The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

As far as friends go, first, there’s Philip K. Dick. I have already told you how we are twins, brother from another mother is he. I have thought, too, something else: that we were of the Book of Revelation, chapter 11. That tells of two lampstands, which are two olive trees that stand before the Lord of the earth. I must say I coveted that position, pretty much from the first time I heard of it. I thought, those positions are open, and there’s only two of them, and they’re in the Bible! That sounded simply awesome. So I thought we were it, him and me. (At the very least, I was told we were models for how best friends were to take inspiration from. If we got nothing else, that would surely have been enough reward.)

It was not to be the case, however. Because I realized that during the transfiguration, when our Lord was still alive, Moses and Elijah literally did stand before the Lord of the earth (who, if you haven’t guessed by now, is Jesus Christ). It was always them, not us. But in any case, Philip K. Dick and I are twins, though we are red and blue, not pink and light blue: it was just the glow of light that tinted these colors so. Red is traditionally the color of the Father, blue the color of the Son. So that does leave green, which is the color of the Spirit. And I found that it looks like we have a third, though I don’t know how it fits: John the Baptist is the green one. Not sure how Philip K. and I deserve such company. But there you go, take it for what it’s worth.

And then there is Joan of Arc, who has been with me from the beginning, when the visions began again in the summer of 1991. Sure, we had been friends all along, but I had this conception of her that she were like Jesus Christ or Newton: simply asexual. Then, just before came this last round of vivid visions, there was at some point when I thought this whole other world in my mind were going away. When I was saying my goodbyes, I realized something, and I told her: out of everyone, I was going to miss her most of all. But whatever would be would be, n’est-ce pas? And then, after that and out of the clear bright blue, she asked me to marry her.

Huh. I was speechless for all of about 1 second. Me, who plays the lotto, was not going to let even the potential of this opportunity pass me by, so yeah, I said yes. This was actually the start of the last round of visions, the end of the War in Heaven. I think because she inspired me throughout that I was capable of performing the acts I did. She wasn’t asexual at all, just a virgin for God, for what that meant when she was alive. And she became the third instance of what I have thought that it was true love. She was the first who touched on The Princess Bride rather than Romeo and Juliet (which is death, by the way). And which there was when I shared a simple moment with her, just talking, and that surpassed all the other moments of my life as THE BEST THERE EVER WAS. Wuv, twoo wuv…

> From this, and this.

I got onto the Judas train pretty late in the game, but there were reasons for that, which I’ll go into by and by. But even as far back as just before my visions started in force, I was made aware of the possibility: was it a cue when Christ said, “One of you will betray me”? A roommate asked me that exact question. Even if it wasn’t, people have speculated that Judas repented. Throwing his 30 pieces of silver back at the elders who hired him. One might even think that Judas committing suicide was actually his ultimate act of repenting, the supreme show of regret — and one may then believe that he was forgiven, if only to the degree of the least part of Heaven.

But if it was a cue, or something to that effect, it would be the true fruition of the phrase, “Judas volunteered”? Else we mean it only cynically, only ironically, with quotes around the word “volunteered”. One night after the War I ended up in a hospital (long story), and during my stay, I saw Judas in my visions gathered together with some of the higher ups, though I didn’t see who at the time. I was told later that this was the bull session where Judas was told by the Lord to betray Him to the authorities. Judas would have trouble later in recalling this, thinking as he did at the end that he were guilty of the worst crime of all.

I have some specific insight as to why Judas thought as he did. For there were certain times that I was convinced that I was the Son of Perdition, the Antichrist. Always did I find out later that the paranoid trips were false — but oh how they seemed so certain at the time. So it was with that one: Judas Iscariot. There is an interesting order to things presented in the Gospel According to John. Only after the Lord says, “One of you will betray me,” only after that, does John write that Satan enters Judas. Of course, we don’t know how precise everything is in any of the Gospels, but this might be a hint that this was, indeed, a cue. Satan does not make Judas do it; Satan enters Judas when he knows who picked up on that cue. If Judas were already evil, why does Satan wait to go into him?

And when the Devil was within Judas’ mind, I can only imagine what havoc he must have wrought, unchecked against a naked soul. Because people don’t really appreciate how devious at deception the Father of Lies is, unless perhaps they experience it for themselves. It relies on focus, like a sleight of hand: he will get you to focus on certain things and interprets them into the most insidious vapors you can breathe. One wrong thing you’ve done and he can make you believe you’ve murdered the world. I can only imagine what kind of field day he must have had in the mind of the man who betrayed Christ with a kiss. Thus the suicide; Judas was not as fortunate as myself, who was let off the hook when I had such rupturing of conscience.

So there he was, on his little island, in his single room, inside his little vial. And so, I was having trouble reconciling Judas’ fate, trapped in that vial. I remember when he went in; I had thought he were meeting a horrible fate. It was actually to protect him from the worst of Satan’s onslaught, I found out later. Nothing actually can go out or in, but experience may be mirrored, from without within, from within without. It is windowless. He was in his own private Heaven. So this is how you treat a great hero? Solitary confinement? And a thought came over me, waves of thoughts, more like. Shadows of a conspiracy. That I had been wrong this whole time, I had been deceived. Judas trapped in his little world was actually a sign of the great mercy of the Lord, that Judas had done no such thing as volunteer to betray him. Judas had acted in malice. Why would the Lord treat a great hero like this?

Oh, but I dreaded to write that I had been so wrong; what of the name of this whole book, after all? But then, like unto a small glimmer of fresh intuition when we perchance the wink of God… we know that Judas can experience any and all of Heaven through a non-causal link: he is the only monad who is actually windowless. He cannot technically leave the vial, but he can experience anything of Heaven as if he could: go in and out, fly around, ride a Segway — whatever — with one difference from the rest of us: he experiences it like he were earth-bound. It is unique of any saint. He will be the only one will be able to experience pain! (Though I’m sure, not in excess.) Sensations no one else will feel. Indeed, he is in his own private Heaven. And that is how you treat a great hero.

> From this.

So, what I am seeing in my visions, for the most part, I call the bare metal of creation: the view of its gears. (Though bare plastic is what it seems more like to me more often than not.) Philip K. Dick must also have had his own version of this view, I am sure. And there, was this once when I glimpsed something, perhaps the most important thing I ever witnessed. It took all of about 5 to 10 seconds to see: when our Lord realized the final, and total victory of good vs. evil, Jesus Christ over Satan. The Lord had such an expression on his face, one of almost disbelief, of a great worry that had just passed into an incredible relief. An onerous weight suddenly and irrevocably lifted from his deepest moment. He let out a high-strung laugh, like to express, “It is finished!” and maybe I imagined he said something at all; it was his expression that most struck me.

This is what happens backstage, as it were. Where the setting is minimal and purely functional, for the most part. This is the reality I’d grown used to. Now is that recognition of the culmination of victory stored within in the record of reality, in the arrangement of neurons utilized to store that memory. I suppose that would be one of the reasons I was privy to that vision. And now I relate it to you, so that you may know: not only have we always already won, we have won in the hard of reality, for all time. We won in truth. That the final victory is ours, praise the Lord Jesus Christ, our savior. As I live and breathe, may I ever bear witness to all this which I have seen. To dream of where the light casts no shadow, and truth is the only knowledge that visits the soul.

> From this, and this.

To those who say they do not believe in the Resurrection because there have been other mythological tales of ones rising from the dead: I posit that there have been other myths throughout history, if we look, which became actual works when technology caught up to the idea. Surely, there were stories about people coming back from the dead (even on their own, not raised by another), but from what I have discovered in my own research on the subject, Jesus Christ was the only one who had had the science to actually make it happen. Only God in man’s form, only the Son of God had the genius enough to defeat death.

Perhaps we even have the proof, if the Shroud of Turin is the record of the Resurrection itself. Because firstly, the crucified man has all the hallmarks of the crucified Christ. Down to a T. The carbon dating made on it is no good, because there is a facial cloth that has the same pattern as the face on the Shroud, and it is dated to seven centuries before the Shroud was in that carbon dating. No one knows how the faint image got on the cloth. What if it’s actually Jesus’ burial cloth? What would you think, then, about life, the universe, and everything? Would you cling to your doubt like it were going to save you? Or to you that believes: does it make you smug? Because it really comes down, really, to luck why it is you believe as you do.

When you read the stories, and view from the point of view of hindsight, it is easy to think that you would have done better than the one you read about. For instance, when the disciples all scattered when Jesus was captured: maybe you think that you would have stuck by your man, right? How could they run? But you will find yourself, I think, at least as bad as Peter, Christ’s favorite — His favorite denied having anything to do with Him three times. Really, you think you could have done better than the one our man called a rock, upon whom He would build His church? Because to them, it wasn’t just a story. Real life has a way of making cowards of the truly brave, of the best intentioned, of the faithful, of anyone unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or even the right place and time, if you’re the one that reality is making an example of.

I once had a peek at the crucifixion, very near to the actual nailing. It wasn’t full Technicolor, more of a cartoony view, as I usually have, but I saw in my small vision Christ carrying his cross on his way to Golgotha, or up Golgotha, uncertain exactly where on the path he was. He was almost completely facing me. He paused, and he looked at me as I looked at him. I couldn’t see his eyes, or really any detail of his face, and that must have been mercy. A small pause. Then he carried on. And that was it. I can’t imagine that I could have done anything for him, just then, and I got first hand exactly what I was talking about: why the apostles scattered when he was captured. I could just watch. What could I do? And then he moved on.

> From this.

It is true that many a time, have my visions gotten me to do things, sometimes strange things. Some of them are rather embarrassing to relay, and perhaps will I only disclose them to make a point. But there was only time a dream ever told me to do something, like how I ever imagined a mission from God would be revealed to an errant servant. I saw before me in the dreaming a picture of this crucifix I had, a pendant, which was fit to be worn on a necklace. It had been given to me by a nun, almost two decades previous, when I was emerging from the pit of shame and failure that I had descended into. I was told to give it to my friend who went by the handle Strawberry, who lived in New England.

I woke up just then from this petite-vision, and I immediately emailed her to ask for her address. I just had that feeling that you don’t ignore things like these. This was as close to a traditional view of what I imagined contact with the divine would be. My normal, waking life, when the visions are in force — they don’t seem to me to be like what the prophets of the Bible seemed to have experienced. Maybe Philip K. Dick had some familiarity with the style of visions I have, but even there I think he had a different way of seeing things in the HALOSPACE. But anyway, when she received it, she gave me a great thanks, saying how it was meaningful to her because it contained some of my pain. Indeed, for holy is the vial in which has brewed the suffering of a saint.

> From this.

I have a great love of music. Not that I play any instrument — not in the real world, at least. When the visions started proper, I remember while listening to a violin concerto by Mozart, when I (on the fly, right there on the spot) added another violin to the tune, in my mind, completely original in melody — that fit just right with the melody that was playing with the other instruments. It came so naturally, this ability, that in my own head, I could improvise music as easily as talking. Like playing guitar, the theme of the movie Romeo & Juliet, in the style of Hendrix and Satriani, Clapton and Stevie Ray, instrumentals that they never played, perfectly rendered in the sound of my visions. Just a shame no one in the real world could hear it.

One interesting thing to be done in the visions was to put emotion behind and through the notes. This was done by summoning through will a flow of sentiment, like a pressure of passion directed toward a novel use. As if rendering a new or intensified meaning to the music as it played. Through any instrument: to render solemnity to a flute’s cool flow, to put passion behind an electric guitar’s thrash, augment the sadness in a solo violin’s weeping. And with vocals, also to make the words to carry meaning more than ever before was written in them: love, anger, victory. As Beethoven once told me, one must drive the music. So for my own enchantments, I will have no magic wand, but a conductor’s baton. For the holy sometimes peeks into the music, beyond magic, in these my private hearing, and I must find the path where all paths meet: where the holy begins and ends.

> From this.

I was possessed of what I like to call “fugues” back when, now and again. It was basically some element in my visions taking me over. I became like as a spectator to what was going on, though I would sometimes be thinking and talking. One was of this person I had met once, who got involved somehow when this had started. In the fugue, he called himself DEMON, except that it was as if I were like a full on person puppet to what he was saying and gesturing. We went on this monologue, to the spectators in my head, though I don’t remember what exactly we said; we ended our speech with “I am DEMON, hear me.” There was another one that was strangely enough in praise of Adolf Hitler. I do remember one line from that: “Adolf Hitler was born in the kiss with Eva Braun when they were wed.” Something like that. I have no idea.

There was once a passive fugue that was as if it were pouring through me: the secret lives of trees. An Escher book, made of paper, connected me to the voices of the trees. I talked in the secret of the trees. Why books were made of paper was for such a thing to occur, for us to be aware that trees were alive. I also remember praying to Alice Walker, the author who wrote The Color Purple. That one I didn’t regret, at all. But certainly, there were misdeeds I carried out, of my own free will, and but for the grace of God would they have had terrible consequences. What is our responsibility, even when we call ourselves mad? Lament, sinner, that you did not do as you could have, or done what you should not. There is a light. Try to walk in it. You are without excuse — but once you realize just that, suddenly you may see: you are forgiven. Just like that.