> From this.
I once read a book called A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, by Julian Barnes. The last chapter is called “The Dream”, in which absolutely everyone goes to Heaven. Even Hitler. Now, you should know that when the visions hit me for the first time, I had a messiah complex going on. And so, I wanted to save Adolf Hitler. The Barnes book wasn’t scripture, so I felt the need to implement it so that it were just as good as. You know, I figured, if the worst person ever to have existed could be saved, then it must be that everyone would be saved. Strange times, they were. And sometime stranger still there would come, from the fingers of eternity touching down through the HALOSPACE. That type of salvation was truly just a dream, though, what I was wishing upon a star. Something that faded and came back, but never to be what we first thought things would be. Indeed, things were almost never what they originally seemed.
There were scatterings of Romeo & Juliet, there was a page of the Bible from the perspective of Leonardo da Vinci. What was holy and true did not last the night, but then the night ended in dawn. I awoke elder gods, one of whom became my friend and began to spread the Good News (yes, that Good News). For it has been said of me that I entered into the dark places and made friends with the horrors within. (Though I know, too, that sometimes that the pit may be too bright, and that in haunts of solemn darkness, one may find the holy.) And then, when the dawn came, the architecture of the sunbeam proved to be still true, and that which in the night we held in silent hope: we cried out in joy.
The Good News, survivor of darkest nights, does it not speak of a son of perdition, that that man: better that he had never been born? This Judas Iscariot: there has been venom tongue that has spat on his name; but let me speak as his advocate, lo, these many centuries since the man was decried and vilified. This man I call Saint Judas the Stone, as surely in Heaven as Saint Peter. The Devil got his way for all this time, and we all have condemned a brother. For Judas was told to do as he did, by the Lord Himself. For there were many things that did not happen as it is written. And many other things that one could say of them, “it is written,” that were never written down.
An admission, to get it out of the way: I did drugs. A lot. But if you want to dismiss everything that happened to me as merely drug-induced hallucinations, explain how it was that LSD helped Crick discover the structure of DNA? And why, when I quit using drugs, that the visions still came? Just saying I was on drugs doesn’t explain everything. But this goes somewhere: as my story goes, back in my junior year of college, I was in my studio apartment in Pittsburgh, and it was the weekend. So I was dropping acid. It was a relatively “normal” trip, until at one point, I looked out the window, and it wasn’t Pittsburgh. It wasn’t earth. There were suddenly bars over my window, where normally… not so much.
Philip K. Dick wrote about a… place… called the Black Iron Prison. That was my own first experience of it. It was an evil environs, the sky was dark but dim with red, the buildings of an architecture of claws clasped over the joints of all the black iron, of which every exterior was composed. And there was something unnamed above, which you didn’t want to notice you. I was convinced I was in Hell, you know, “Abandon all hope,” and so forth… Anyway, I visited the place a few times, and the last time I was there, I got out when I heard a whisper, like someone were letting me in on the secret: “Walt Disney is God.” That will become important later.
But it turns out that never was a Hell, only that a Black Iron Prison was superimposed over the world, visible only in a psychedelic nightmare. It can seem like Hell, though, even if you don’t feel an ounce of pain during your stay there. If you look in the painting, Garden of Delights, by Bosch, in the third panel, “Hell”, you can see in the very far back the building I visited when I was imprisoned for a short time each time there. And each time I was rescued by trip’s end, back to party down another day. This was before things got serious, leading to when the visions became a permanent fixture in my life…
…but Judas Iscariot, does it not say that he was the one that was lost? What became of him?
> From this.
Judas volunteered. Just so you know, I’ll get this off my chest first. The ramifications I will get into later.
My experience begins twice, and didn’t make sense until just about the very end of it. The end was when I was Chief Gunner in the WAR IN HEAVEN, and my codename, my Native American name, was crowfeather. (I will capitalize things when the importance and magnitude of the concept warrants it.) After the War was over, and in fact, when it was nearing its end, everything in my mind started coming together. What I had repeatedly prayed for was coming to pass: I was in the midst of making sense of things. Of everything, more or less.
I had been drafted in the War twenty-five years back from when I began to write this, but in most of the years I served, it was pretty much without any substantial knowledge that I was doing so, up until January of 2013. When I witnessed, when I participated in, its very end: SATAN being cast from HEAVEN. An intense vision, but not as intense as when I had been drafted, on October 7, 1988, around 9pm eastern daylight time in the streets of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. There I was witness to an INFINITE light, which told me I was not that light, and I was as if nothing while in the midst of it: center everywhere, circumference nowhere: so bright as to be solid, the trim of God’s light — the barest taste of the glory of God. That’s when it technically began for me, when I was enlisted to fight the good fight. In the war in eternity.
It didn’t really begin for me then, though. I was a normal college student for about three years after that, one of those years in academic suspension for partying too much and not going to classes enough. The visions really started in July of 1991, near my twenty-second birthday, and they were with me ever since then — even in my most regular hours were they lurking in the background. It was in 1991 that I met Joan of Arc, Jeanne d’Arc, but I didn’t know what impact that would have later. There was Philip K. Dick there, too, whose works seem to reach people just when they need it. I also met Jesus of Nazareth; he wasn’t Jesus Christ to me then. All of them were like cartoons in my mind’s eye, which had apparently burst, and was sometimes something of a palimpsest over the physical world I saw from my regular eyes. Nothing made sense then.
