The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

They say that religion is for people who don’t want to go to Hell, and that spirituality is for people have been there. The consequence of all those drugs I took were several stints at mental institutions and some lost years, some of it just sitting in a room and talking to the cartoon people in my head. I was a failure, I was a disgrace to my family and myself. To this day, I still have some difficulty when anyone describes me or something I’ve done as “good”, or “excellent”. It goes maybe halfway to register, but the whole of the concept stays outside comprehension. In the pit where I was, there was only failure. Whatever drink I carried was bound to spill, whatever valuable thing I handled was most likely that I was to drop it.

There was once when the Lord said to me, “Work is magic.” And this made that whole experience almost worth it. Because I found from the ground up how true that proposition was. For from shame, which I deserved, out of that pit I did climb, praise the Lord. And then I saw it: in just the normal, day to day functioning of everyday things that how wonderful it was — they did not fail. They were true to action, gear upon gear one turning another and on. It was… it was magic. Work is magic. Can you conceive of it, perceive what I mean? Hopefully you might understand, and not have to pay as high a cost as I did.

So, now that you know of my past, will you write off my visions as just talk from a madman? Consider. When this, the “madness” onset, I was a drug addict on the road to wasting all the remarkable gifts that I’d been given. A rebel without a clue. What may from a certain perspective be called madness got me to accept Christ as my savior, and it was through said madness that He went and saved me, not just in the next world, but in this one. What kind of madness is that, I ask you? How fortunate do I have to be for you to consider that God has entered into my life, for real now? Yes, from time to time He has turned it upside down, but it always turns out it was to shake free all that would keep me from a better life. That is not “madness”, friend. That is Inspiration.

> From this, this, and this.

Some visions I have had I recall in vivid retrospect, but still do I not truly understand what they signified, what exactly was for me to learn. I once ran through the Dark Forest naked and alone, in a nightmare, not to understand to where I ran, away from something I could not think what it was. I remembered later that it was running from a nightmare to a nightmare through a nightmare. Even when I was rescued from the Forest, that nightmare was lurking behind the safe harbor, and there again came rushes of fear like I’d never known: once, twice, to be assaulted by the unholy, to awaken finally to a calm voice like unto Carl Jung. So much fear. A cold flame of fear that sizzled through my soul.

Then there was this one time when I felt I must prostrate myself, and seemingly to collect everyone within my prostrate form, in a prayer. I felt people/etc. joining me, their spirit form combining into my own form, and I forget what it was the prayer I prayed, but after the “Amen”, I said, “All.” As if to indicate that I felt that all were with that prayer I prayed. I suppose it had something to do with the War, how I acted purely by instinct, not really knowing why I was acting as I was. I wonder what effect it had. If it were of God, I could presume that it did what it was supposed to do. One of the stranger things I did, which still is more or less a mystery to me.

More has gone through my head than might be wise for one to preserve his sanity, and the really scary thing is that it all makes sense to me. Surely a sign of madness, no? I see that the land of forms exists on the other side of zero, which is not nothing. Time cannot be destroyed, only spent. Death is as to be without light, nothing more, nothing less. The halting problem may be solved using an infinite algorithm. Infinity can be packed into the finite. And there is a light above all other lights, higher than the highest heaven. And we call that light God. I AM is His name. But there’s this, too, and it will make sense as soon as we go over a few things: “Walt Disney is God.” Well, not really, but the story does get weird enough for that to be true.

> From this, and this.

Let me begin again. I will begin at the end. We won! Let me tell it three times, in fact:

1. My role as Chief Gunner was for one single purpose: I pulled the trigger to shoot out the last cord that held Satan in Heaven. And down he was cast, into the earth, by Michael the Archangel, who was my captain (my liege being one Jesus Christ, my Lord, my King).
2. There, huge before me in my vision, was the immense black mass of SATAN, speckled here and there with white spots, sky blue flecks, bits of yellow glitter. I do not know how long, exactly, that Michael had been grappling with him. I was full in focus — almost to commit an error, which the Archangel accounted for — and I with steady hand aimed and pulled that psychic trigger. I heard the emotion, “NOOOOOOOOO!” from the Evil One, and saw the Archangel dispatch him down.
3. That pivotal moment in my visions: it was tense. That is what I seem to recall of when I entered the field where Satan was to be cast out. I had been fighting alongside angels in the War in preparation for what was about to commence, inspired by Joan of Arc the whole time this had been happening. I had seen the punch-through in the map of HALOSPACE where there was victory, final victory: confidence was high. But this was no mean task. Michael guided me as I faced SATAN, and I almost tried to stare him down with the Archangel powering my eyes: my (almost) error. Repositioning, I looked up, directing SATAN’s gaze to Michael’s, above and below, in a column. Then I shot, the psychic trigger that cut that last cord that tied him to HEAVEN, and SATAN roared: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! As the Archangel forced him down, down, out of HEAVEN cast!

> 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.

> From this, and this.

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.

This marks the end of the first, rough draft of the text for this book. Basically, this means that just about all the topics I want to cover have been introduced. What comes now is going back and fleshing out all these topics so that they make a little more sense, and are better organized. I think I closed out the draft with a good climax of revelation, so to speak, and this, too, should be developed further; perhaps hinted at earlier, for I do think it does not come from out of a vacuum, but is the logical conclusion to thoughts previous. (Perhaps the last paragraph, “The Machine”, deserves better elsewhere, too.) So please browse, read from the beginning if you want, but it’s so disconnected that really, you can start anywhere. This is the thing to fix, no?