The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

We all have our own points of view. I was shown this quite graphically once. I was staring at page one of this old Bible I had, the Book of Genesis, with the “Let there be light” and all on it. I forget how it came to be, but, gazing at that one page, I was privy to how that single page qualitatively changed — when seen through this and that other person’s view, personages from throughout history. I got to see the world from other people’s eyes, as close to literally as one possibly might figure you can. I would bet you never really thought about it, and neither did I, before this. We look at the world, and a printed page is a printed page is a printed page. Except I found out that people’s experiences are indeed personal, each one of us our own. We surely have specific eyes that view the world, each viewpoint especially just, singly for each one of us.

Albert Einstein had something like an Earl Grey flavor type of filter — yes, like an Instagram filter these were. But founded, as if each filter were a natural seeing, if special. Vincent van Gogh had something like a margarita. I saw my own, from times back, and that was like lemonade. (I regretted looking through Hitler’s, similar to Albert’s, but with a strange sticky coldness that I have come to know as the sensation of a personal evil.) The best may have been Leonardo da Vinci’s, who was, as Vincent put it, “stingy with his stuff.” It was like the hint of looking at the original Declaration of Independence, that Bible page.

The most curious was Jesus Christ’s. I couldn’t hold onto even a fraction of his point of view. Every time I looked through it, it flowed around and through whatever sigil I was looking at. It was the opposite of madness, a supreme Reason did it seem to portend: Order opposed to Chaos, however much it was in motion — that I could not fully wrap my mind around, but comprehended was present. There was so much of it, shifting in my eye, ungraspable like dense but transparent smoke. It meant one thing: he really is infinite. He really is the Son of God. Fancy that.

> From this.

Reality may be described by one, two, and three things: structure, information (descriptive structure), and quality (interpretive structure). Structure is that which may be understood as existence itself, and is likened to Kant’s noumena, which cannot be directly observed (existence apart from anything cannot be observed on its own). There can only be observed information, which is to say, things that exist, which is likened to Kant’s phenomena. Information thus is sufficient to model the universe in ways that comprehend everything in it. However, one might go further in its description. One may say that quality is how anything experiences anything else, or anyone. Or in other words, the means by which reality is measured is how quality is manifest, quality being the measurement itself, and a third means of describing the universe.

Though one can describe everything with information, the subjective reality requires an interpretive referential. It is the means by which every story is born. Note that quality itself can also be described with information. Which is just manifestation of structure, in the way that can be observed — structure comprising all that exists. And then all observations (for these are measurements) are of quality. One, two, three… infinity.

In a less analytical version of what reality is, what is real may be described as that which has true quality. And to be true means that it has natural structure, which is to say, it is a complete structure. This should hold even if we apply it to that which is not exactly real-seeming. For instance, when the apostle Paul went blind, Ananias of Damascus receives divine instruction to cure him of his blindness. As these events relate to the physical world, they have quality true. That all these events join without incongruity, and that they complete all expectation, it means they have a natural, or complete structure. If the accounts may be believed, they are real, and in this case, that which is of the spiritual world can be said to be reality as much as the physical world. Of course, that is if you believe the accounts.

When you behold a deception, it does not have a natural, complete structure. What is promised does not come to fruition in the case of a lie. If no one had been waiting for Paul, then we would doubt that what he saw was in any way real, for it is then tantamount to a lie when he is told that someone would indeed meet him. We may, in fact, find true quality in the event of a deception, but that would mean the revelation of that deception not having natural, or complete structure. In this way we do not make any lie true. There are ways, however, to do just that…

> From this.

Epicurus said:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

The big problem with the claim(s) of this argument is that it presumes that God has to use our logic to do things. To give faith a chance, though, think of the possibility that He knew that evil would happen, but that His purpose would be served better if He allowed it to happen than if He did not? That the most good would come about as a final result, which would exist in eternity? (Note that this counterargument is not to say that the end justifies the means — for He Himself does no evil, giving only freedom.) Perhaps we merely act upon the argument that we do not prefer things to go wrong, but when they do, we make of things better than if the wrong never occurred? If there is an eternity, an afterlife, we lose no chance to make it up to those destroyed by the world.

Many questions that deny the existence of God seem merely to underestimate Him, or think that He operates in a way that is trivially understood by beings that are far, far inferior in wisdom and of purpose. And to harp on the point that God is willing and able to stop evil: we call it Judgement Day. Just because He doesn’t follow your timeline doesn’t make Him incompetent. It is no longer thinking out of the box to claim ignorance of the existence of God. Now that we see a bit clearer things of scale, find a place for infinity in the finite: see how well that fits in your world.

> From this.

Once I awoke, or was awoken, in the middle of the night. I felt so strange, when I did, that for a moment thought that I might be having a stroke. I breathed in and out deeply a couple of times to settle my nerves. What I saw before me was a vision of a dimly lit golden space, and I was then shown my relation to it: how paltry was all of everything that I knew, that I had conceived of or measured, and how stretched forth that dimly lit golden space in what could be known. The sheer expanse of what was possible. It went on, and out, and kept going, most probably infinite, but I could not tell, as I was merely a finite soul wading in a pool whose foundations were architected by God Himself.

Surely, we cannot think that we have anything like “just a little more” to figure out in science. We were that smug just before Einstein broke that sentiment, late 19th and early 20th century. We have barely scratched the surface. We as of this writing cannot even make most of the proteins that comprise us, and these are some of our basic building blocks. Not even all of physics is unified, surely not to brave the concept of all of science to be unified, from pure mathematics to perhaps psychology, or anthropology, or sociology. Do we truly, in our pride, seek to know the mind of God? How, when we do not know even what it is in our own? Physician, heal thyself.

> From this.

Sex. Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about sex. According to the moral high ground, that being the Lord’s, we are not to have sex outside of marriage. Or put a different way, a lifetime commitment. This may seem to be quite an unnecessarily high bar to set in this day and age, where contraception is cheap and plentiful, but so is meth. We don’t lower the bar on what it takes to be a saint, do we? And if we did, what would it mean, that word? Why even have such words if you make them meaningless?

He does seem to forgive cases that don’t make the grade at all. He was known to dine with sinners. He said of the adulterous woman, let him without sin cast the first stone upon her, and that after all of them had gone, he himself did not condemn her. We will get back to this point. But for now, suffice it that the bar exists that is high, but he understands if we can’t reach it. And he said nothing about homosexuality. So, as it stands, after all is said and done, only sex within a lifetime commitment is right. But he will forgive we who fail to meet such a demanding virtue. Do your best, right? Hope it is enough. What else can we do?

There is a reason why sex should not happen outside of marriage. And why generally we shouldn’t be shooting up heroin. Let’s take the second: it was described to me once that an addict quit Mr. Brownstone (slang for the drug) because the feeling was so good that it made everything else secondary by comparison. Thus, such an ecstatic feeling — meant, in fact, for perhaps such experiences as true religious ecstasy — this became the mundane. Like an orgasm that lasts an hour available without (much) muss or (much) fuss at any time, day or night. Shall we state that such pleasure was not meant for such base circumstances?

We then harp on sex: this was meant for what, naturally, leads to a commitment that is signified by its procreative aspect. And children are meant for a lifetime. Outside of that, we are not meant to experience that kind of gratification. This translates in all places, even homosexuality, to not doing “you know what” unless we are committed to that person for life. This is how we translate values into new contexts. I understand today that such things may be cheap, or are easily cheapened. It doesn’t mean that we lower the standard of things that are supposed to be. Some things are right. Some are not. It’s not all relative, though we do rely on context to make sense of things. Good is not just a myth we have outgrown.

> From this.

I was shown some things about thinking in scale. Some, astronomical scales, like the distance to a quasar represented as a number of light-years. (This goes somewhere, later. Just follow for now.) Let us say that there might be a model of an idea in, for instance, the form of a rather plain circle. That idea, however, might be representative of such a thing as how to raise oneself from the dead — the most astounding thing ever done by a man (a certain man, you know). Another circle, on the other hand, may be just a circle, empty of any extraneous meaning. Some figures have potence, others might be models of those models, only representing power rather than having actual power themselves. And even infinite things could be held in words, if those words had potence (for instance, the tetragrammaton: YHVH: this could hold the essence of God).

Now, let us say that the entirety of the Kingdom of Heaven could be expressed as a single yellow dot. This becomes very important, and relates to Philip K. Dick and the secret society of Christians I ended up joining, as he did. Very very important.

Dick wrote about when he started having his own visions how he was explained that the fish amulet worn by the girl delivering his meds was an ancient symbol of Christianity. Whereupon he was told in some secret voice that he were being initiated into an underground sect of secret Christians. That’s how things started for him. I got into that scene 25 years after I had my light from God experience. That was the day I later went into angel proving grounds, and eventually ended up at New York Presby. But introduced into it I was, and I was told just after my intro, by a voice: as he informed me of the society’s presence, that I were finally safe if I were to die — then, and only then, would I have been able to escape the Black Iron Prison on my death, and welcome in Paradise.

And my initiation into the secret society (different for everyone, I suppose) ended up being that I purposefully peed my pants — and actually enjoyed the experience. Do realize that that was not even close to the strangest thing I’ve ever done. For the faith, or you know, whatever… And what about that yellow dot? Walt Disney is God.

> From this.

there are zero matadors
dancing on zero tables
fighting zero ferocious bulls
zero bloodthirsty spectators
carried by zero flying carpets
yelling zero metaphysical truths
and the zero of the countdown
makes much of such nothings
as zero approaches in secret
the flip of a dread switch
when everything happens
and the crowd goes wild
at the slaying of the bulls
while the matadors dance
while we fly into oblivion