Tag: wisdom

The Empyreal Question

So it is, that something happens to you you don’t like, at least initially, then with a twist of fate, things go unexpectedly your way. You might say, as an appropriate response, that everything happens for a reason. Even agnostics may use this line. But do you really know what you’re saying? Is the meaning really there—reasons, reasons for the reasons, to search your idea of what seems likely until you are satisfied in its logic? Or indeed, is the reason for it all just a convincing illusion, which have no basis in what is concrete and steel, in whatever maybe called of the real? Perhaps we have sympathy for the Devil, for whom the light of such revelation is itself the enemy…

One thing I found in researching metaphysics is that there are always patterns to be had—you just need to look for them. Not many of them are fruitful, even if they be non-trivial, another thing I learned. This pattern matching, I believe, is at least part of the explanation of the psychological phenomenon of “everything happens for a reason.” Because things seem to fit together so well, we imagine they were made to be so conformed. Destiny. But this is an astonishing world, even just talking about the noosphere, the mental spaces we explore. Sometimes the words we put together are poetry, sometimes it is just a mess of unimpressive metaphors. And one might say that a person often views one as the other. So it is with reasons why.

Correctness—can we even talk about that when we talk about the patterns in the air? Is thinking what happened happened for a reason—how can we know that we have found the real reason? And what, exactly, would be meant by that: the real reason why things happen as they do? Here’s where religion seems to take a separate route than the agnostic. For we have it in the Bible where God Himself says He did such-and-such a thing or that such-and-such thing happened for a certain specific purpose. In this vein, there is the possibility that when you think you know why, you may actually be right. The agnostic may never be sure. Or be sure that there never is a “real” reason. In any case, we rarely go beyond if we are satisfied with the reason(s) we have discovered why something happened as it did.

Now, it is quite the case that what and how we know things is far beneath what and how God knows things; for indeed, we of abstract things can rarely deal with absolutes concerning them—such is the province of the Most High only. Not even angels fly in such stratospherics. But if we could have a God-given rationale, would we then listen to the “real” reason, or shall we stubbornly cleave to our own logics, of which we were satisfied? For then, we come to this empyreal question: what did Lucifer see, when he rebelled? I have been told that angels are not like people, that they have perfect knowledge. Did he see in the darkness of evil a pattern he could not be talked down from, shadow of his pride?

It was in the committing of his first sin (anyone’s first sin ever), that he broke his perfect knowledge. Lucifer had discovered something truly new… What is evil? Surely there is no mystery to it, now, is there? And in fact, Lucifer’s committing that first sin defines it quite succinctly: evil is the desire to do wrong. And perhaps throw in the desire to have one’s own way, which is the bad kind of pride. Some people say that in evil is the seed of its own destruction. Perhaps, but one acknowledges that Lucifer really had something when he discovered evil. It was indeed the “dark side of the Force”, that comes quickly and is applicable just everywhere. There are patterns in the evil, too, the schemes of every Bond villain just waiting to be conceived and made flesh. It is seductive, it is insidious, like the Watercourse Way—but to slip honorless through darkest deed, no enlightenment of love.

He must have seen a pattern in the madness, called that mess of unimpressive metaphors poetry. Perhaps because of this misreading, he incorrectly perceived that it would be his victory that was to come, and such is part of the nature of evil. This was his pride, and its blindness. In breaking from the Logos, from holy reason/holy logic, he did not precisely perceive the ultimate conclusions of his actions. His own logic was a poor substitute, formidable as it was. He took his own vision as the world’s, and was doomed. Whatever is in the mind of evil to do, God has always been prepared for it. And one might think with such occurrences as the Holocaust that things are not completely in His control, but that is the test of faith. For the most horrendous things that happen to us—it will be slight in comparison to the glory that will revealed in us, by the king of glory.

The fact is, great is the pain that some people suffer. Some of which certain persons survive, it seems to mine own self incomprehensible, unimaginable. If you told me that I would be the one to have to tell them, that their pain is nothing compared to how God will recompense them, I would tell you I am a coward and cowards say no such thing as that. But somewhere inside, there would yet in me be an unbreakable kernel that believes it to be true. Why did it have to happen? What possible reason could it have happened for? It would be in the opposite direction; the reason itself would have to be of light incomprehensible, purpose unimaginable. If we can, to make of things better than if the bad had never happened in the first place. (And thus, perhaps, is the kind of rationale we seek when we perceive the pattern of the reason why.)

Can we hold as hope that we need only believe there is a reason, and the cause seems sufficient? For I imagine that some of the stories we have made of why—from the point of view of eternity, how wrong we will have been in the mundane myths we have made. But for here, and for now: if they help us to hold on, is it not enough? If we have faith in a reason for everything, and if things make sense to us somehow, then we have something the Devil lost when he decided his own logic was better than the ways of Eternity. He gave up all sense, all meaning. His is that there is no reason why, and that in his courses would he make the universal law.

Even if we are wrong in our particulars, it is granted to us as courage to try and find the why. In seeing the duality of perceptible meaning, the polarity between good and evil is clear. It is why the afterlife is only divided in two, traditionally, for many fail to understand that it is so—one operates by light or darkness, and it is degrees by which we do so, but we truly carry our heart by a single song, that ultimately desires one or the other. In which you decide, at the end, of what you would make out of your life as a whole. All the reasons why: shall we commit light to the whole of it or bury the whole forever? Truth or nothing: that is the question. Truth or nothing: that is the choice.



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

Fire

The War took 25 years to run its course, to me at least, roughly. Time is very strange, especially when you apply it to Eternity. But even there, if anything is to be done, you do spend time in doing it. When the Devil was cast down, it is said that he was filled with great wrath, for he knew his time was short. No longer in eternity. Like a time traveler in a movie, no matter where in time he visits, the time he personally experiences goes inexorably on, and this time will run out. Lucifer visited me at different stages of his rebellion, and I will always remember the Event that finished with his being cast from Heaven (the Fall). I was privy to more than that, though. Like the Event’s encore.

I was in a hospital from a heck of a day, some days after the Fall, and I was wrapped in a sort of holy blanket in the air, enveloped by the Spirit, for something monumental was about to happen. Something that had been long held on a razor’s edge. It was when I saw Lucifer die. That is, his soul. I remember I immediately lamented, for I had thought it was someone else, that it was a different event, but such is the grace of God: it was perfectly fitting how I did react, and had I known what it truly had been, my reaction would most probably not have been up to snuff. But what I saw: this was Satan committing to the reality of his defeat, that he had made the ultimate choice to go in the direction that would lead to his doom. That was it.

What I saw: life, his essence like a patch of heat in the air, and then *snap*: it was gone. Nothing but a sickly dead empty stillness. I only found out later what it actually meant, what exactly had happened. As I said, I had been admitted to a hospital that night. When I was so admitted, there were secret Christians in my visions’ voices who told me that Judas was innocent of the charge of the betrayal of Our Lord Jesus Christ. They said it in sort of a cumbersome way, so I put it like this, and it was that which was said from then on: “Judas volunteered.” Right around that time, my thinking was hovering around Universalism, the theory that everyone was saved, all the way down to the Devil. Then my mind focused on one saying of Our Lord: “Only one was lost.”

Now Satan, he was “shopping”. Looking through the looking glass. Either he thought or it was precisely the case that there were at least several different eventualities between which he could choose and instantiate: to make it so. So right about this time that we were talking about Judas, and saying how he would be the only one that was not saved; it was universal salvation except for that one which was lost, and indeed, it would have been better not to have been born for him. That was the cost. He was to be sealed (his soul) in a sort of vial that could not be opened by anyone but God, and He never would. And in that vial? Horror beyond horror. Unimaginable pain. For if he were truly lost, he would be the only one that had no savior at all. No escape. No respite. Worse than the deepest part of Hell.

So when I was sitting in the hospital room, Judas seemed as if he were preparing to go into that vial, girding his loins, so to speak. I talked to him, and he seemed a very capable apostle. I did not detect anything malicious about him. He was one of the good guys. When he was told that it was time, I looked and saw in the air what I thought was the vial. Then that *snap*, and Judas had supposedly been sealed in the vial, why I saw life then death. What was really happening, though? Judas was bait. And the one that caused that *snap*, for none of us was going to do it, none of the good guys—guess who that was? The Devil had wanted to see it happen: an innocent damned for an eternity of horrors, while he would walk away after some sort of punishment, into eternal life. It was too good to resist.

But it was the death of his soul he committed, when he instantiated this reality because he so wanted to see it happen, to see someone that lost, for no reason. No, it was not the only thing that Lucifer had done to deserve his spiritual death, for in making real this reality he was also making real all the crimes he had committed in it. Eternity works weirdly. In a sense, that instant was both the beginning and the end. I witnessed where reality became real, and the end of all preliminaries of the War. Apparently Satan was kind of spread out in his preparations, for he did not know which of the realities was to become the One. Our side, of course, knew this one was it, and could prepare that much better. This was Normandy, and Satan was hemming and hawing about whether it was this one or his Calais. (D-Day references here.)

From what I heard, though, it was critical that Lucifer instantiate this one. And it’s a terrifying thought: why was it that this one be chosen? And it was quite simple—that this was the only one where we won. In every other reality, the bad guys won in the end. But the Lord knows what he’s doing, quite clearly. He knew Lucifer was watching at the exact right time, for that plan above to gel. It had been quite the design, but what the Lord wills comes to pass, always does. And after the instantiation, where Lucifer would look in on this reality from time to time, he always assumed it was one of the paths he did not choose, and simply shrugged it off that he in fact lost here. This is what pride can do. Such is that kind of blindness.

*       *       *

Now understand, I speak not that you might believe the things I saw, just to say that I have seen them, and I tell you in truth that what I report is as a genuine witness. Do you ever wonder how it would be if there existed a prophet like that of old, here in the modern day? Do you think anyone would believe him? Or would they write him off as merely a madman? Not that in much of our civilization would he now be slain for his words, for perhaps we are good enough to let one stick around these days. But with all the false prophets spouting lies, and inventions of their own minds as gospel—would the true prophet be identifiable amid such noise? And would he be known as a heretic for the truth that has long been waiting to be told, or might the message ultimately succeed, if it is from God? Is it up to me? Or is it up to you?

What would you expect a prophet to say, would you think they would be popular things that everyone could agree upon? Would you expect him to be preaching in a megachurch with crowd pleasing sermons? For there are false prophets that say, “When I speak, God agrees”, as opposed to he who truly is one, “God spoke to me, a sinner!” Do you expect a sign, when Jesus said that only an evil generation expects a sign? When all you have to do look around, and see: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.” [Matthew 11:4] Can you not see the signs of the times, when we are indeed beginning to solve the ills of the world, as the Lord spoke of? Can you not see that the Kingdom is at hand?

Indeed, I have one prophecy. Like this: “Repent, for the Beginning is near.” All your implements from the ages of cruelty, they shall be bent and melted and reshaped. He who propagates lies in order to gain power shall find his deceit uncovered, and he shall be put to utter shame. The one whose way is violence will find that way outmoded, and outclassed, by the technologies of peace. We are beginning to understand how bad it was, and it’s gotten, and the people are beginning to wake as if from a slumber of two thousand years. Repent, for we will be made to answer for what once we hid away in the darkness. To discover, beyond belief, that the masses can have a heart, and can show unusual kindness. To discover that we can be clever enough to solve what we thought to be the thorniest of problems. The Beginning is near! None too soon.

And one lesson I have to relay to you: from Christ, his two commandments: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. The first, roughly the same as when he said to love him before anyone else. It is to love the holy, the true, the pure of good, even if we can never hope to attain it ourselves. Just believe that in truth, God is love, and one need not believe in God to believe this. Then, love our neighbor: only when we understand the true potential of human destiny, to love everyone else—with all their faults. To forgive them. One does not love God as one loves everyone else. To love God is to adore the embodiment of absolute love, absolute good. It is joy in holiness. To love one’s neighbor is to love them in spite of their mistakes. It is to be human. To see the shine beneath the tarnish.

So what does it mean, to love? Do you not see? Have you not heard? Love is so simple, we’ll never understand it. Love does not hide in the heart, waiting for you turn it on: it is written that we were made in the image of God, who is all love. We love with all of us. We love with our spleen. Do you truly wish to be a child of God? Do all things (ALL THINGS) out of love. Brush your teeth out of love. Take a shvitz out of love. Seriously, decide that right now. You don’t have to be a part of any religion to do this, for to be human is to love. This I believe with all my soul. We will err, and I know that that’s what a lot of people mean when they say that we’re only human. But mine eyes have seen the glory. Jesus Christ shows us what is possible when he does the impossible. Ignite the world with such a fire.



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

drop

to drop into the lap of love
dancing within the secret life of flowers
like angels on the head of a pin
and to bring out in your step a mastery of life
(concern ourselves in the fashion of ephemeral troubles)
have you not heard? the Good News to riddle?
the best story wins
the pieces made to fit together
we cut no corners
it’s meant to give at each the open edge
what tune is it in the susurrus atmosphere of the Movie?
the music that makes us sound
(as i waltz with a burning one)
i know, for one, luck is no beggar
i to have fashioned my own very hands
to have been favored to dip in the gravity of it all
the rose without art i dropped in her lap
the story composing itself past anxious first maneuvers
this dream does not end like you think
the best story wins

Enlist

It is somewhere in Christian writing; it might even be in the Bible, I’m not sure. The text says that there are people who do good and are saints in their own right, except they do not know God, or Jesus. That they are naturally this way, not needing to be prodded by the Lord to do what is good. I wonder how many Christians know about this. There was sort of an uproar when one church had on their outdoor sign, better a virtuous atheist than a bad Christian. And the uproar was quite enlightening. It is a wonder how few “Christians” actually read the Bible, for surely it would be remembered what Jesus said, “Why call ye me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not the things I say?” And I tell you this, surely it will be the virtuous atheist that will be saved, and not the bad Christian. Once again, the Bible makes it clear, that it will not be the one who “did mighty works in [Christ’s] name”, but they who fed him when he was hungry, clothed him when he was naked, who did it for the least of them and so did it for the Lord.

And so it is with the War in Heaven. There are people who fight on the side of right, and most who do so have not an inkling they struggle with us in the War. The highest halls of power are being converted, even as we speak, from the grip of the Age of Iron into the halls of the Age of Gold. One must realize that we make the new Age using the implements of the old, as we invent things from the elements of what has already been formed. The Age of Iron will fight to keep a hold of power, for this is its nature, almost the entire purpose for its existence. Augustine said that one sure indicator of a lost soul is sexual immorality; I disagree. One sure indicator of one lost to evil is the lust for power. You can spot one who is in power, whether he is for the right or the wrong simply by seeing whether his actions are meant to make all of us equal, rather than to put one sort of people in greater precedence to another. Especially if there is no rational basis for that precedence.

The Empire is ending. The Empire has ended. The Empire will end. That is in the language of Eternity. And one from Philip K. Dick: “We have always already won.” Amen, brother. Some in power deceive the people, for they say they side on the cause of morality, of old school values; they say they want to give you back the world as it used to be, when it was simpler and things made sense. They say these things so that they can make money from those who are deceived, and so those people act against their own interests because the deceivers prey upon their pride and their fear. They listen not to the ones that can help them, because they believe that those sort have morals that are “loose.” And things are going to get worse before they get better. But they will indeed get better. For I tell you, the Beginning is near. (This comes with a warning, that a prophet’s sense of “close” may not cater much to anyone’s patience.)

What it ends up being about, the whole fight, is whether you are for or against the Logos. It is a Greek word, often translated as “word”, like the beginning of the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Greek reads “Logos”, which in actuality is better thought of as “holy reason”. This, in other words, is the logic by which all things must ultimately function: the Logos was God. This is why people so often say there is a reason why things happen as they do (they’re right, but usually for not the specific reason they conclude it is for). So, the side on which, exactly, you are on: how do you act to get what you want? For the ends do not justify the means, especially when the ends themselves are not so noble. What will you shove out of your way to achieve your goal? If you tread on people along your way, you may just come upon opposition by people who believe you are wrong in doing so, and if they stand up and fight, they are indeed on the side of the light in the War in Heaven.

For they will try to ape the Logos, those who desire not the light to shine on their deeds, and concoct a story, a logic to justify them, but what they are peddling instead is derangement. Do not believe anyone who says they are for Christ and are against science. It’s as simple as that. What is transcendent needs no protection from logic. To anyone who puts himself between science and God: you underestimate both of them. Do you seriously not believe the evidence of your own eyes? For such you are when you deny such as evolution or climate change. We understand that you are not scientists, but neither are you priests, and you seem to claim to know something about the faith. And how is it that they have made you hate the poor and make idols of billionaires? “They strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” You would rather squeeze the pennies of aid to the poor to cut countless dollars in taxes for the rich. Because of their story, their “logic”—their derangement.

But everything that is hid shall come to light. If not in this world, the next. And Heaven help you if it is in the next world that your evil is revealed. Those who are of the old age, of priviledge and “divine right” will not give up their grips on power without a struggle. And comes the new age, of pragmatism and fairness, which the world still cannot believe we can ever attain—but I say to you we can. I say to you it comes, not like a storm, but a dewey spring morning. The end of the world is not nigh. We do not count on God to solve our problems in some sort of dramatic and epic cataclysm. The War in Heaven ended—I witnessed Satan cast from Heaven. It is ending, the Age of Iron falling to the Age of Gold. It will end: our job is not done until we are all seen as equal, saint and sinner from the same bowl. It is frightening for those who are invested in the old way. Priviledge dies hard. But we cannot continue to go on as we always have done. History shall bear this out.

They who fight the derangement fights on the side of the Logos: on our side, the good guys. Holy Reason. They who propagate the derangment either knowingly or unknowingly help to spread the Evil. They who fantasize about being a superhero and punching out the bad guy: these are not the ones we are trying to recruit. Christ, instead of conquering the Devil and the world with the power he certainy had, chose instead to go to be flogged and killed in agony; he rather chose to love the world than subjugate it. Because they who would subjugate the world are the ones we are fighting against. Repay not violence with violence. Because to fight the Empire in this way makes you part of the Empire. We must do what is right with reason behind us, not instead to be of brute desire. Not to think that because we are Christians, we must be right: but because we are Christians, we know we are wrong. All of us, sinners. Not a big deal, that, though. Unless, of course, we deny it is true.



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

The Beginning Is Near

It was told that there was a certain small thing, a yellow dot, floating just inside the fringes of perception. It was said that to look at it, to see it, if even it were a barely conscious perception, one would be given the keys to the Kingdom of God by that glance. More powerful than the hammer of Thor, and more precious, it would need to elude the wrong pair of eyes. For if known to the right evil entity, it would mean an eternity of horror, on a scale beyond imagining, for all humankind; for all the world; for all worlds yet to be. Was it true that the Lord Jesus Christ, in his voyage between his death and his resurrection, left it in his wake, to let it drift in the ether? Were there actually people on the lookout for this phenomenon, scattered through the real world—or was that secret sect only a product of fevered minds, with eyes halfway in the halospace?

Symbols can do things in the name of the thing they represent. As in, a signature can be the extension of the power of someone, in lieu of their actual physical presence, to give orders (for instance). Of course, if the party on the other side has no idea who that person is, that signature may not have as much power as one might hope, depending on circumstances. What if a signature existed in the most minimal of forms, that of a solitary dot, which had a certain color to distinguish it from other like dots? If most people saw it, it would be as if they knew not at all who signed it or that even it were a signature at all. But if they knew what it was, if they found out, they could use the authority to terrible ends—if the authority were such like an angel of the Lord might have. Perhaps even worse? They say in the Bible an angel killed 180,000 soldiers in one night…

There is more to the myth: for one, an extension to the yellow dot. If indeed it met the right eyes, word would be spread in codified format, something that was whispered to mine own self, near the beginning of my involvement in all this. Among the secret Christians, it would be plain, the same secret Christians Philip K. Dick believed contacted him at the start of his own adventure. I believe all the mysteries of the universe can be summed up in that saying, that word to be spread, if you know exactly what it means: “Walt Disney is God.” And no, it was not meant to be taken literally, but if the yellow dot were perceived, it was salvation for us all—to enter into a new age, where everything was light. That was the pivot of that sentence, “light”. As Disney stuff, “light” was in the sense of not ponderous, entertaining; and then “light” on the flipside of the coin meant like “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness”. And as I said, it was whispered to me those years back: Walt Disney is God. We were saved.

It was of course Philip K. Dick who had perceived the dot. He wasn’t even consciously aware that he had seen it. It was hidden away, tucked into his translation of saying #77 of the Gospel of Thomas: “Split a piece of wood and I am there.” (Jesus Christ was saying this.) There was a little danger that Hitler would see this dot, for that phrase was discovered before the translation that Phil read, back around the turn of the 20th century—but it was by Englishmen, who apparently never translated it into German. It was only fragments of Thomas that had been found then. At the time I had joined, there appeared to be at least some segments who had not known that it had been found; it was still going around that Walt Disney was God. And then, there seemed to be a rumor about other dots, most notoriously, a black dot: the consequences of its discovery was supposedly terrifying to conceive.

Turned out, though, it was not so bad as all that. There were three other dots, four in total, and we discovered the meaning to them all:

  1. yellow: the Knowledge, this being the key to everything
  2. white: the Power, which actually without Knowledge, was not as great as you’d think
  3. purple: the Certainty, which guaranteed victory
  4. black: the Mystery, not so scary after all, but which in some sense contained the inklings of the other 3

They represented the four pillars of creation. And yes, they’ve all been found. By the good guys.

It is so then that I bring you (some more) Good News! Satan has been defeated, on Earth and in Heaven, on the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the good arm of the Archangel Michael, and the Age of Gold enters the stream of time. Hearken: the Beginning is near! And you are given this news because it has been accomplished: the breaking of the ground for the New Heaven, and the New Earth, which has taken as much time as Our Lord was in the earth between his death and resurrection: two days. In God time. In human time, 2000 years. In forty days more, thus it shall be that the course of the world will be completed, and then, the Lord shall return, in the manner that he left: via the sky. What did it matter, the dot that was perceived? The Knowledge was a memory: not just of the past, but of the future. And without this memory, nothing was real. Everything was baseless. Without memory, lies have all the power. But fear not. Join, instead, with all that is good and true. There is a light. Try and walk in it.



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