> From this.
You know, every major religion has at the root the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is a fact, backed by research. Do a little googling and you can find this to be so. It is not to say one religion is pretty much like another, but it is a key that many have found, just that one thing. I am, however, contractually bound to tell you that Christianity is the “correct” religion. Yes, I’m going to push my own religion on you to prove I’m just like the rest of them. Or maybe not? Because I have found two curious items that I don’t know why they’re not mentioned more in defending our particular faith.
Firstly, in Judaism, God says to Moses that His name is “I AM” — this is a brilliant conceit: no other god is named so, no other god is, this is saying. And no other god can have that name. By saying His name is “I AM”, He is saying that God exists, I’m Him, and there is no other God. Period. And beyond that, the name Immanuel means, “God with us”, which is saying that Jesus Christ, who has this name, is literally God in the form of a man. That is what being the Son of God means. So the messiah, which is what “Christ” means, must be the literal Son of God, which is what Christians believe him to be, with us on earth. The immanent God.
If you want to go further than that, we can see that from the behavior of the Son, since he shares the same nature as the Father, we may conclude that God is good, that God is love. For this is what the Son shows himself to be. He did not garner victory over evil by strength of might, friends. What would that have proven? He won by being the servant of all, put to death in an unjust world, giving his very life to bring salvation to the world, submitting to the will of God, whatever that might mean. The sign of Jonah, three days in the belly below. To overcome the world, to overcome death itself, for this is the Son of God: whose mystery is deeper than death. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
> From this.
Ultimately, your destiny is squarely in your hands. Once the Lord said to me a fascinating outlook, “What’s unfair about life is that it is fair.” This gave me tingles, and I thought it was the meaning of life, right there. (Turns out I didn’t understand the question.) True, we do not get put on earth with exactly the same advantages as everyone else: some people have it easier, no doubt about that. Those who do have it easier will be the first to tell you that things are fair, if you factor everything into account. No. What the Lord was talking about was that everyone has the freedom to choose what one does with what is given. Whatever comes, it is up to you how you deal with it.
What a lot of people seem to be lacking is a simple attitude adjustment — right there, that can do wonders. Decide that you will not pass up the next opportunity that comes up: to do right, to do better, to do good. Not to waste whatever talent you may have in making excuses instead. Do you actually have any idea what it could possibly mean, to do your best? I would hope that the answer is no, unless you have done already some monumentally paradigm shifting feat in your life. Because that’s what it means to do your best. Nobody is lacking that opportunity. Do something that will change, if not the world, then the whole of your life. Not all the time, but maybe at least once in the time you’re given. And then, welcome to the team. We have a lot of work to do.
The women I’ve had relationships with… I’m definitely a legend in my own mind. (Only in my mind, though. Reality was always tougher.) For one, I was pursued and did myself pursue Rosanna Arquette for the longest time. What did Eris’ Apple of Discord say? “For the prettiest”? Forsooth, that would be her, at least, circa 1987 or so. She came into the picture when the visions started, early on, in 1991. When I initially had thought I was talking to the same spirits of the people I saw as cartoons, as to be able to transmit and receive messages to their current earthbound forms, I ended up going to New York City a couple times to meet up with her because she said that she’d be there. Of course, those were just half baked, pipe dream journeys, but they were sort of fun, anyway.
I think she had that cultural issue that kept her from being attracted to asians, so it was basically doomed from any start, right there. But at the time, I really believed that it was true love, and that we were bound together in a strange method. There was this one time that someone came closest to breaking us up: I was involved in some drama with her on the side: and that was Audrey Hepburn. But I remember, I couldn’t help introducing her as, “cultural icon”, so that wasn’t going to work, either. Years went on, and the woman in my head became a woman who was real, and she was a hottie, too; then she broke up with me, then we got back together, then not, but still present in my fantasy world, eventually to find out that on earth she’d married and had a baby. C’est la vie. Then I had a rebound relationship, in my mind, with a Russian model I knew, and then… and then… I was found. That was Joan of Arc. Quite a journey. Such is love, no?
I guess I should talk about the fifth member of my inner cabal, too. I have had a friendship with Albert Einstein that has seen it all. It was known to go through a few troubles, mostly me being the one doing someone wrong — but not always. He was one of my closest friends, and though I spent probably the most time with him that any of my other 4 closest, I always saw him most as a colleague, a kindred spirit in science. He had the most input when I was working on my artificial intelligence. And metaphysics: I actually saw the black dot when we were discussing information and structure as what makes up the stuff of the cosmos. (I corrected him on a point there, whereupon the black dot popped up. I don’t think he ever forgave me for one-upping him there. Heh.)
Some people it was said thought of Albert as if he were not quite of this earth. That he seemed almost alien. Myself, I saw him quite differently: the most human human being that I’d ever met. And I mean human in the noblest of the meaning. (Why exactly do I have to say that? Are we really that bad, prototypically?) And you know, I loved him so much that I found a way to convert him to Christianity, just in case… but the Lord sort of made fun of me because I did: saying of him, “You didn’t think we saved Einstein?” Sort of an incredulous tone, yiddish accent. The implications, though, of that statement! You know what it means, right? Basically, He’s saying, “We’re going to save whomever we want to save.” Whatever, to your ideas that He must follow the letter of salvation’s law! What do you poor relations know about love?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.