> From this.
Atheists, and perhaps some other groups, believe that ultimately, there is no purpose to the world except that we give meaning to it. Well intentioned, very rational, but it also touches the height of arrogance. To think that there is no purpose to such beauty, on the grandest scales, except what human beings tag it, with our crude implements of language, music, art, etc.: seriously, that’s the best that can be made of these incredible vistas? Or is it even otherwise, that skeptics are humbled by the magnificence of the great things of the universe? To those who have eyes to see, it is exactly like the hypothesis that there must be other life in the universe because of the sheer number of other worlds that must be out there. There is so much beauty that there must be a greater purpose.
A lot of argument by materialists (those who only believe in what they can physically touch) boils down to one possibility: things may be this way because they have to be this way. There might be no other way it could work. This line of reasoning also accounts for the thought that there might be other universes, with other laws of physics, just that this one is the one where things work enough for us to observe that it does. It then may come down to a variation of the Anthropic Principle: things work this way because we cannot conceive of any other way they would work. But let me tell you, I’ve glimpsed Heaven, and it doesn’t have to work this way. There is infinite possibility in material, that which we might have difficulty in visualizing because they only work by a certain means here. There are different ideas of physics than we can conceive of because our brains just don’t go in that direction, so we rather can’t even think of conceiving them.
It comes down to taking things for granted. Again. And to think that all that you see is all there is. We do not think that there is a greater purpose, a Heaven to this earth, because we ignore that which evinces such a purpose. Can you conceive that all you see might not be all there is? One believes in the existence of Africa because it fits in the framework of logic that lets us conceive of its existence without our having to go there. The spiritual world is different, indeed: there seems to be no grand framework that governs what goes on, where you can go, who you can talk to, and how any of these things happen. The thing is, it can’t be made sense of the way things make sense in the material world. That is the flaw in trying to find its governing dynamics. One might think, however, given the sheer number of people who have experienced this other, that one might give a second thought to dismissing it offhand.
I say it is possible to touch this unseen world for yourself, and to see that it is real, after all. Because there are people who have gone there and come back, and for all the different types of visions they have seen, we all have the same commonality that we are human beings, every one of us, who can only express things in terms of our 5 basic senses. Let us then say this entire book is a method by which God is reaching out into the earth, which it is. Can you conceive of a logic by which all that is spoken of here is true? For surely all of it is to the best of my recollection that which was real, to me. And if you do let in that possibility, you then touch the unseen world thereby (or it touches you, same difference). See if that makes any difference, any at all, in your life.
> From this.
The Church of the Subgenius is a tongue-in-cheek religion that may or may not be serious. They correctly point out that when some off color group does arise that is serious, they’re at a high risk for elimination. With prejudice. A bunch of Subgenius related themes have presented themselves in my visions, the primary being that on several occasions did I meet J. R. “Bob” Dobbs (and also have I occasioned to meet the anti-Bob). I once concluded since he was an imaginary entity, he was the only real thing that I was seeing in my visions (the rest being figments of fantasy, since they were representative of things in the real world in some way — that is prime Subgenius logic).
He is foremost a prophet of God, a truly fascinating character. No nonsense, great sense of humor. I once asked him, in all honesty, “Why do you do what you do?” And he really had to put his mind to it. Being a rather perfect servant of God, I don’t think it ever entered his mind to ask. Finally, he answered, “I’m a good guy.” That was it: because he was one of the good guys; this was his raison-d’etre. Simple, noble. That would be Bob. Like Albert Einstein, I performed an unnecessary conversion on him to Christianity. I actually sold the greatest salesman in the world on Jesus. Or you know, maybe not, could’ve been that he was always a believer. Sometimes you wonder what’s actually going through his head. I imagine something divine.
I have seen snakes in the fire. No, this is not a portent of doom. It was in a commercial on TV, the view from the top of a fire a few feet wide. I think it was actually a commercial for charcoal; now I don’t remember. There was a grill and it was the charcoal that was in flames — nothing weird, but interesting to display a screenful of fire as the central image for your product. But it happened to be the case that I was coming back into the real world from a little stint in a mental institution. So, a little tweaked, would we? (Ahem. Kidding around.) The licking of the flames looked like snakes writhing. Snakes made of the flickering plasma-like sliptwisting of fire in curving fluctuation. Nothing much really came of that vision, just a really cool thing to witness.
Also, while we’re on the subject, I saw once when I looked at one of van Gogh’s self-portraits, the yellows and oranges: it looked like that paint was on fire. There are other things I have seen, too, but these two stand out as the more or less hallucinatory side of this experience (which I call life). And people may think of madness as being dark, but I found that the opposite was much rather the case: things being supernaturally bright was more of the indicator of insanity. So anyway, there were other things which may not have been so flashy as these two in aspects of fire, but some of the more subdued ones — those may have portended things of quite the deeper scope.
(In which I have sometimes found myself walking through a dream, day through day. I do not know if you would call it all madness, though I know that there were things I have been through that would most definitely qualify. Sometimes to feel like that song:
i am superman, and i know what’s happening
i am superman, and i can do anything…
I’ve had that feeling, I don’t know whether it is so very good or so very bad, that I am a hero upon the world, who does great things in the service of humanity. I know it is not just a dream, these visions of mine; I know it is not just a passing madness, that flows into the backwaters of time, never to be questioned or rationalized. I think madness has not the poetry that I have witnessed, the verse of musical meanings that have sewn in me such hope, that I will never wear a mind without the fabric so intimate with love, intrinsic in the thread. There is a light. Try to walk in it. That is what my visions say.)
> From this.
There is so much you take for granted, that if you wrote them down, surely they would fill all the books in the world. What I take for granted, they would fill a few less, because I have pondered such a thing as not to take the barest functioning of anything for granted. (Work is magic, remember?) The reason for that being one of those cases of where the curse is the blessing; but that sidenote notwithstanding, just like a fish doesn’t know what water is, you generally don’t understand just how much you should really, really be thankful for. For example, we can take just one of our senses, and just one aspect of that sense: seeing color.
In The Color Purple is written how God gave us the delight of the eponymous color purple, and well should we be in wonderment about such a thing. But take the least of all colors, if any can be said to be; perhaps beige: and see how fantastic it is that we can have light that has an emotion (such is color), and that we can experience it. The fact that there are three primary colors that must mix in a particular way to give you that particular shade. That there is a medium through which that color, over there, can travel the distance to meet your eyes. How your eyes can perceive color at all, and that we sense its particularity by countless firings of neurons that make up conscious thought. That light travels and is not stationary. That distance is traversable. That time ticks forward to let things happen… Do you yet see that there are numberless things that make up the least of any experience?
When we try to examine why things are as they are, in the noble pursuits of science, we try and take one by one thing less as an assumption. We try and explain why something happens, and we take one less thing for granted. (We cannot explain yet why it is we can explain things, however. More on that later.) If you are careful in the chain you follow, you can always, at any level, ask why a certain thing is a certain way instead of some other way. It appears that such lines of questioning can be infinite. So, what does it mean, then, to ask indeed, “What if it keeps going?” I say, if it does keep going, and going, then ultimately, what we have is a transcendent phenomenon; and only if it ever does stop dead in that chain of “why” somewhere, is the universe, is creation, ultimately meaningless. And seeing all these reasons, that go on and on and on: we take all but an infinitesimal of them as given, as part of the system, not brought to mind… and there is a reason for that.
With even worlds enough and time, we will never be able to answer it all, especially if it is true that we can always ask why. This is not to say that science is without use; on the contrary, this means science will always be of use. Always to discover why something is as it is, if there always is a reason. But it speaks instead of more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy… We have the barest toehold on what things are, why things are, how they came to be and how their future will progress. And we cannot but take the sum of the great masses of reasons for granted, except for the shallowest of scratches: for we are mere mortal frailty, none of us capable of gathering to mind the sublime coherence of all rationale, dive the timeless depths of meaning held in even a single color, unreflected — the most normal thing in the world.
> From this.
My visions, I had many theories about what exactly I was looking at. I call it HALOSPACE because it doesn’t depend on anyone else’s definition — that just means, whatever I see. At one point, however, I liked to call what I saw as watching the Dreaming. Not only because of the Australian aborigines’ conception of such a space (which I really haven’t done enough research to relate to it, anyway), but seemed to make so much sense, for the common definition of the word: that the mechanism that handles giving me dreams had broken, and I was dreaming while awake. That which was in my unconscious spilled into the conscious, as if there were a small and persistent leak. That’s why I had thought to say that the people I saw were just the people you meet in dreams.
So, it wasn’t really happening, in this line of reasoning; none of it was “real”. None of it was in the deepest cuts relevant to what was going on in “real life” — it would all blow over, just wait. Or you could say, considering in what circumstances it all started, it was just a trip… Except now, the conditions for what I was seeing have changed. Drastically and irreversibly. Now, it has to be happening in some way — it must at some fundamental level be real. That vision I had where Satan was cast from Heaven must have happened. There is no two ways about it. All that led up to it, the preparations, and the vision itself, have a verisimilitude that rationally, can only lead to the thought that what I saw was what I saw. More on this later.
> From this.
In Tolkien’s Ainulindalë, in the creation of the world, Melkor introduces his own themes into the music primordial. It was therefore said that none of everything that existed on Middle Earth was of the exact form that was originally intended by the voices of the Ainur, the heavenly beings, and that of Ilúvatar, who was God. I remember reading this and thought it was quite the interesting notion, which would explain much about the world at large: for there is much beauty, but which is much mixed with the ugly. I dismissed that notion, though, off hand. Surely Satan could not have had his hands that deep in the batter?
But then there was this one time, something I heard — almost overheard, almost an aside — that pain was not created by the God who is love. It was, rather, Lucifer’s idea. Can I truly believe this? Because if this is THE WAY THINGS REALLY ARE, holy guacamole how much would suddenly come into focus why things are the way things are. Pain was not invented by God, and if the myths are true, neither is sin, nor death. Was this what was the War in Heaven? To determine what and how things would be in the world, the universe, all creation? This was what we were fighting for? When Satan was cast into the world, this was when he was no longer at his helm at the root controls of existence. These were the stakes. Glad I didn’t know this much at the time. That was mercy.
The idea validates the notion of a world where we basically live by the rules made by the Devil. This was what was meant by the fact of Satan being Prince of said world, for this was the place where his hand was upon anything that is. I remember when I first had that thought, that the world was one which was that unfair — for just that reason — and upon the idea coming to the fore in my sulking, we must live by the Devil’s rules, I heard the Lord say, “Welcome to life.” This was the world where God Himself was put to death after a life of HAVING DONE NOTHING WRONG. Where the best of us were tortured, and hanged, or worse, FOR BELIEVING; and it was easier to do the wrong thing than the right, to hate than love, to ignore than to care. And when we say things were meant to be, it is more often than not by how well we pick up the pieces. Welcome to life.
> From this.
I had once, while I was in that room at that hospital, previously mentioned, a vision of Satan being fought at the cross. That day was quite momentous in ways more than one. I felt the special circumstance that that was, the Holy Spirit strong in the air — it was like once before that were applied to my person, years, decades before, that previous time looking like it were purposed for my understanding when such an event were occurring. It was just before, in that hospital, where I had been told that Judas had volunteered, though the exact wording was different than that, and I don’t remember what it was.
I met Judas for the first time there in that room at the hospital, and he seemed a very capable saint. What I originally was allowed to believe about that statement, “Judas volunteered”, was that it meant a horror beyond horrors. That he was heading into a vial where there would be no God, and that he were going to be without salvation, not even the mercy of a well-formed Hell. Something worse. These misunderstandings I would later see as being quite useful, like the “wrong” notes in jazz. I saw him in a confab with the higher-ups, I presume that Christ was there: this was when he was being told to betray our Lord. He would later have a hard time recalling this, after Satan entered his mind, when the actual betrayal happened.
And while I thought that was what he was heading into Cthulhu type eternal horror, he got ready to enter this vial. I found out later was like unto armor to protect him from Satan during the betrayal. Must have been very intense, the series of events of the betrayal. But before he went, he gave me something to give John the Baptist (which I don’t remember exactly what it was, it had something to do with emeralds), and he told me what sins I was to avoid further in my life. (I have kept to those things.) Then I saw his vial, then snap! He was gone, sealed therein. I felt something like desolation, for a fallen comrade, not understanding what was going on, like a twin in the womb when the other is born and gone out into the world. I was told he was smiling when he entered.
