The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

So, the last time I ended up in a mental institution, that day, I had been put through my paces in Angel Proving Grounds, which did look like NYC, but there were definitely differences to earth. I remember quite clearly, for one, that the walk and don’t walk electric signs were not a little white man walking and orange hand halting. They were strange alien sigils, abstract in form. Anyway, it ended with a trip in an ambulance because someone saw me huddled alone at night before a closed storefront and thought I might be having a stroke. I was cold (it was January, which I mistakenly said that it was July, I was so far out there) and for the last time, I thought I had blown it all; I thought I was irretrievably lost, for one final instance.

So, nice and warm in New York Presby, I was lying there, when some of the angels (Michael’s angels) related to me what some of the things they went through on the front lines of the War were like. Basically, what is reality? What if, if any of Michael’s angels failed, the world would have become irrecoverably deranged, fundamentally illogical? Flawed, and wrong? And this is what it means to be an angel of God: when the stakes are that high, you do not fail. Whatever that might mean, whatever effort you have to put out, whatever humiliation, blasphemy, feces, whatever that means you have to endure, or thrown at you, you do it. Because there literally is no other option.

The derangement Satan and his angels tried to perpetrate touches once more on how we take so much for granted — for instance, logic and consistency. What if you could not take some very fundamental things as certainties? For instance, if you have 8 things arranged in a rough circle, you can count on there being 8 spaces between them. What if you couldn’t? What if there were only 7? Or 6? What if you were trapped in something and needed to get out of one of those spaces, and the seeming escapes were not reality? Because there were pockets of the derangement, as they were being in attempt to inflict upon reality, in the War in Heaven, that existed enough to be dangerous, harmful at least to the angels that fought them. All of which had ramifications, high and low, to the very foundations of existence. In other words, it was as if Atlas, the titan who held up the sky, were being attacked…