EX /1 The Rose

I gave the name “X” to one Judas Iscariot, the one who handed over the Messiah to the authorities, when I was in something of a fevered dream. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream. Whatever it was, I don’t think you’d ever believe it was real. A lot of reality is like that.

There’s another story I got like that, too, when the Great Spirit of the Native Americans looked me over and gave me a name. The name wasn’t “X”. That name was for something else, as I said. I probably have more things like this, but I usually don’t start conversations like this. I mean, nobody starts conversations like this, but wow. I decided to start this like this. And I’m not going to tell you right now what the name was that he gave me, but don’t think there’s really a special reason why I might be doing this… I’m just that nobody. I do these things…

I have not ever thought, not seriously anyway, that I might be crazy. That usually kills the conversation, for one thing. I mean, I can tell some days when I can actually feel my serotonin being on the low side—would that mean I’m crazy or that I’m not? Psychiatry these days, if you didn’t know, is all about drugs. Some are better than others. Depends on how much you feel like zoning out. But you know? If I can make sense of all I see and hear, inside and outside my head, and I can see where the miracle starts, and where the miracle ends, and I’m not breaking any law of physics, nor any law of logic, and I know what is true, and I know what is a lie, just because you don’t see what I see, it’s not crazy if I can see it—it’s not crazy if it makes sense. And it all makes sense to me. Would you think that’s crazy?

See, I had this thought a little while back, just this sudden realization, “Am I the only one who knows what they’re doing?” And I stopped for a second, and yeah. I mean, I know Jesus knows what he’s doing, so I’m not talking about that; of course like all the angels know what they’re doing, but regular people like me? Holy crap, I realized. That was it. I’m the only one who knows what they’re doing, in about the entirety of the whole damn world. Holy shit. That’s crazy. 

And just for the record, he prefers “Josh”. Josh of Nazareth. And before you ask, do you know any other Josh of Nazareth?

Something else.

The story of the Rose is not something you have ever heard before. It goes into another name I’ve been given, which was like the name the Great Spirit gave me, but I don’t know if I want to get into that whole mess and around the outer edges of my mind’s eye I can spy some really evil eyes peeking in and checking if I’ve lost it or am going to lose it at any time and going, come on now, you can’t be serious you know what’s going on, because no one does, get it? So it’s like the evil eyes are the ones who can be looked, here, like they’re being the most rational about things. Crazy.

See, it’s the crazy thing that’s making the most sense. Because what’s really going on is something you wouldn’t believe. Unless you were living it, like I am, right now. And even then, I can see just how completely unhinged it can sound, outside my own head, through that mystery called, “now”, into your sensory mechanisms, into the logical processes you also never think about, but you know? This isn’t actually a conversation we’re having. If you’re not me, you don’t actually know what you’re doing. Yes, you have your job or your school or you’re some kind of bum living with your grandma and getting stoned every day and there are times you forget that you don’t know what’s going on because you’re engaged in some sort of intense physical activity or you’re high or you’re having sex or all of the above, but do you really know what you’re doing? Do you really know what’s going on? Because the common wisdom is to let go of that concept, not to try and see if you can figure it all out, just to let go and find the flow or something, releasing control because there’s really no way that you’re going to be able to make sense of it all. Just be happy in your own little corner of cluelessness. Don’t break any of the more major criminal laws. At least try to be nice to people. But if you really think about it, you’ll hit “WTF is going on with everything?” if you really try and step back. From everything. Which no, you really can’t do that, and there are reasons why. Did you know that angels have perfect knowledge? Do you have any idea what that might mean? No, you have no clue.

Holy shit, I’m the only one here who knows what they’re doing. Which, of course, makes as perfect sense as everything else.

Now, the story of the Rose is not about a flower except that that is what the name is referring to, but is about me sort of feeling certain ways about all the women who have come and gone through my life, about me assigning each of them a flower which when I did so made me smack my lips like an Italian and go wunderbar like a German, like “so spot on”, I would go. Starting with a tulip girl whom I didn’t know so well. One of my many unrequited loves. Or lusts. Yeah, more like lusts. There was a daffodil, an oleander, a lotus, then someone which I couldn’t figure out, then an orchid, and that would have done it for me. Orchid. Cool. Ima marry that one. I thought. And nope, just another life lesson, dirtbrain.

Never found a rose though. The answer, of course, was in front of my face the whole time, I mean for most of my freakin’ life I had known this, and only so, so far in did I go, oh, yeah. The completely obvious is slapping me in the face, over and over and over, and all I can think is, what are you trying to tell me, universe? I already brushed my teeth! And Kurt Vonnegut, you know, wrote, “So it goes” only when somebody had just died. But I am not Kurt Vonnegut. So it goes.

Then there is this idea I had, which I have called, metasynchronicity. (Gesundheit!) When last we tuned in, true believers, we understood the concept of synchronicity as something Carl Jung came up with, an acausal connecting principle, that of a meaningful coincidence. I’m (88%) sure that you’ve experienced this sometime in your own lives. Like you’re ranting about Taylor Swift on your blog and Taylor Swift comes on the radio (and then you’re like, this is an all death metal radio station, what the?). But I’m using it as a form of alchemy. Like, how was it that a lot of great ideas seem to come around in multiples? Calculus by both Leibniz and Newton. The invention of the telephone (there’s a whole drama there, you should google it or something). Charles Darwin was also handed a paper by someone who had written about the fundamentals of evolution while he was still working on his own book about it. So if it seems to happen anyway, why not leverage this seemingly omnipresent principle?

Yes, I used the word “alchemy”. Isaac Newton was an alchemist, and that’s not quite common knowledge. You of course have heard about the seeking of making lead into gold, right? That ol’ alchemist schtick. But really, I’m using the term to describe that which is not quite science, and not quite magic. Utilizing the forces that seem to be prevalent in the world—but not completely understood—to obtain some goal. And mine is about iron into gold, not lead. I will elaborate on this distinction a bit later, but basically, if I work out the details of something, would it then perhaps be carried, too, by some cosmic winds, into other minds as well? That’s the idea at any rate. Metasynchronicity.

And the thing? EUTOPIA. The story of the Rose makes me believe in eternity, in infinity, in Heaven, and in true love. Where God did not call to anyone at all out there, not like before, but I went into Their house and stood at the altar and proclaimed, “Here am I,” as if there was a job opening for two very un/fortunate people out there, I mean it was written at any rate, and I was applying by knocking on Their kitchen window with my resume in my hand, which I called the Book of Love (the only page), and it was blank but had been crumpled into a ball and then flattened and then crumpled again and then flattened until there was no flat surface any larger than a micron on the whole sheet, because This Is Me, to a T, so how about it? God? Hello?

Thou answerest them only with Spring. Such is nature. Not having realized that I had already been recruited, enlisted, drafted even. Back when I was thinking that strange thought, “How does one kill God?” Which the Rose would never even think of thinking to ask.

The story of the Rose is a story that has never been told, but it is as common as the love that the world has for everyone. Do you not believe this? That there is so much love in the world? People are born into filth, people die in slow agony, and yet people will say, “God is love.” Kierkegaard was wrong, in thinking that the absurdity of the universe was to behold the Son of God killed. St. Paul thought as he, as well. It is, in fact, instead, the fact of the statement: “God is love.” That is the true stumbling block to belief, to faith. One of the faithful’s valid responses to the Holocaust (yes, faithful Jew—Christians should be so holy) was, “It is too much. I can no longer believe.” Where was God? How could God let that happen?

Then what is it that is written in the “New” Testament? “God is love.” Yet there is still so much injustice in the world. “God is everywhere.” Where was God when… do you not have one of these thoughts, your own self? Where was God when…? And yet if you peek into the next world, something wondrous. As eternity unfolds like a rose beginning to bloom, which will bloom forever, you hear some things.

There is a guy whose name begins with “H” and was responsible for the Holocaust. You know of whom I speak. I will only refer to him as “The Dead One”. Upon hearing of some of the ideas of how he would pay for the evil that he had caused, when it became clear the scope of such punishments: no, there is no eternal Hell, but there is a Lake of Fire in which they, the damned, die… if it were of the scope of perhaps to feel one tenth of the pain he had caused the world while he was yet alive… I heard cries of pleading from the rabbis… “No, it is too cruel! We just wanted him to feel how one of us suffered and died!” They just wanted him to understand. For surely, no man will have suffered more. This is how The Dead One dies. For this is the Second Death.

The Rose from this world, this life, died horribly, too. She’s never complained about it. So, yes, there is a next world. It’s also not like you think. For example, in one of my visits outside our plane of existence, I was in what has been called the Black Iron Prison. Why I would mention this, there are a couple three reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, the ’Prison was Hell. I mean, everything you would want to think about what an actual Hell, place of damnation, place of “abandon all hope”, darkness, evil, all of the above and more—yeah, I was there. In fact, in my first visit, I literally thought I had died and was in Hell, and that was it. Finito. And I remember one weird thing about it, that when I was there, I was not allowed to think that word. Hell. But that was definitely where I was. And I want to tell you further, that there is no Hell. You see, the alchemy: iron into gold. That’s the second thing.

There has been the idea that the Black Iron Prison was in fact what the world at large, what you and me see in the everyday, that was its true structure. Do you see where I’m going with this? There’s a reason why Tolkien used the term, Middle Earth. The same reason the Norsemen called this place Midgard. The place in the middle of Heaven and Hell. But if the alchemy works, if the time is right, what we are doing is to make this iron into gold. Of Hell to Heaven, of this middle kingdom. From the Prison to Eutopia. The “good land”, not “Utopia”, which means “nowhere”. The new world struggles to be born: the time of monsters. Like The Dead One. You see? The Beginning Is Near.

The third thing: there was War in Heaven.

I could describe what I believe happened in the War, but to tell you the truth, it’s sort of fragmentary, my knowledge of it. I saw what was technically the end of it, the black mass of Satan being cast from the above, and I have something of a joke about its beginning. Basically, it was Lucifer and Michael, and Michael says to Lucifer, “So. You think you’re more metal than God?” Heh. I’m serious though, heavy metal is no indication that one is evil. Not even when you hail Satan. It’s those who do the opposite, who proclaim themselves “Christians”, and you know who I mean.

But the main thing about the War: God did not invent pain. Before anyone knew anything of what error might be, there was a Heaven where nobody ever did anything wrong. You see, it was Lucifer who sought to do something that God could not do. For this was a limit for obvious reason: God could not perform an act of stupidity. You see, that’s what evil really is, capeesh? Evil is to stupidity as sin is to error. If you have read your Bible (which you should, if only to piss off those “Christians” above), you know of the idea that the Devil was a murderer from the beginning. The meaning of this is in another part of the “New” Testament, where it speaks of the Lamb who is slain upon the foundation of the world. And there is only one Agnus Dei, one Lamb of God, and there is only one place where it is the foundation of the world, where he is slain. The Cross. (That’s his superhero name. Josh’s. Josh of Nazareth.)

So the question I had back when was not on point, really, “How does one kill God?” Turns out he’ll let you. The real question is, “What happens if you kill God?”

(parenthetically twice there was this one prophet who said that GOD was to be found in the trash layer of the universe and a lot of people thought wow that really makes sense for some reason and don’t think about it any further of why would GOD be found there and then they don’t seem to have eyes to see the thing they see like every day of their waking lives where on the cross THERE IS GOD AND WE HAVE THROWN HIM OUT)

You see, there is that notion of, if God stopped thinking about us, the universe both as we know it and beyond would cease to exist. What fucking idiot was going to test that out?

And now you know why Satan will never repent. Because that would mean to admit that what he did, that incredibly stupendous new thing he found, the thing that not even God could do, was, simply, stupidity. Itself. The source of all error. And error manifests itself most cruelly in pain. Next time you feel it, think about how ugly and harsh it is. No, it is not of God. Never.

What that meant was a crack in the Godhead. A crisis in existence itself. Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon, and the Dragon fought, and his angels, and prevailed not: neither was their place found anymore in Heaven. There’s one thing you must understand now: nothing of the now can be undone that was done. Pain exists in the very fabric of the material world. How could this be? I remember reading an unbeliever’s mocking of how an infinite God had some problem with an itty-bitty finite archangel like Lucifer. Behold, the power of such a light gone awry: the very heavens and earth groan from the stab of so dark a blade, who tests the very limits of their God given potential in its strike, enough to alter the structure of destiny itself.

“How could God let this happen?” seems so valid a question, as if it were all Their fault. But when you look at God, it’s not like They spared Themselves from the pain of this world, nor was pain Their cause. The Cross is where it is reconciled: this is the picture of a God who is love. 

…I have not seen any of the fields where the Rose once strolled, not smelled any of the soil which her hands touched. Yet I believe that she is here, sometimes, when I dream while I am awake, or at least, that is how I describe the motions of my mind when they are driven by the heart. I just have the one poem where she always will dwell, a brief impression:

there she was
the tip of eternity
in a kiss

EX /2 Apocalypse

The Doomsday Clock never rang. You might have an image in your mind, a select few of you, who are old enough, who have seen a picture of the top left corner of a clock, how many minutes away we are from nuclear armageddon. That’s not, however, what I am actually referring to. True, that’s also never gotten to midnight, whereupon we’re all completely walking to the middle of the road in some secluded neighborhood and lying down on the asphalt waiting for the missiles to blast us all into oblivion. There’s another, different picture, which I’ve always called that, the Doomsday Clock, which you most probably have never seen, which doesn’t look like doomsday at all, not really. It’s a clock face surrounded by a pattern of sparrows going in and out from the radius, and blank, white birds, also (which I always called doves). It was done by one M. C. Escher. Yeah, I’m not “cool”. That’s the MC I’m most familiar with.

I never thought much about where the hands are situated, at least, not for the longest time, even though I had called it that. The Doomsday Clock. And that something must have frozen it there, at that position, at 3:01 on the dial. Didn’t think why, hadn’t a clue, until… There’s this story, you see, and you all know this story, because it’s supposedly like THE story, and if you want to know anything at all, you should know that the dream doesn’t end like you think. The best story wins. And this, the Greatest Story Ever Told, has the climax, where it is written, that in the ninth hour, a cry is heard: “My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?”

And GOD DIES.

That happens in the ninth hour. 3pm… And everything was still there. We’re here, too, two thousand years later. So the Doomsday Clock, it may tick forward to the next minute. And there it stops. God has died, and we’re still here. The Doomsday Clock never rang. Never will.

Let it be a commemoration. For this will be the launching pad of eutopia.one, the face of that Clock. Our EUTOPIA’s official name. Some sparrows flying out and away, some flying in with the doves, joining into the fabric of the clock itself, till there are twelve blank doves ringed around its circle.

The idea of eutopia.one, it is based on some scripture, one metaphor, the Resurrection, and a small idea. People, who have not thought it through or noticed, think that Josh came back from the dead three days after he died. Not so. If you pay attention, you will note Good Friday is only two days away from Easter Sunday. The Crucifixion is the first day, the sabbath is the second, and the Resurrection is the third day. Why this matters: you have heard it said that a thousand years is as a day to God, and why this matters: it has been approximately two thousand years since the events of that climactic weekend. Two days was Our Lord (Adonai in Hebrew) in the belly of the earth, and on the third day he rose again from the dead. That means, we should be expecting something. Right now. But not what you think.

The idea behind eutopia.one is a little bit of text from late Isaiah. It’s been used in various contexts, but the thought is simply, “They will reap what they sow.” That’s it. That’s the only thing you need to have a EUTOPIA.

So here’s the metasynchronicity: right before the advent of Donald Trump, which was when America jumped the shark, I had such hope in what I thought was, not the end, but the beginning. We’re still sort of there, as I write this, and maybe (if Heaven be so bold) it’s happened by the time you read this. We were down to one group of people, from my calculus. At this time, we believe the following to be wrong, everywhere, for everyone: tyranny, slavery, human trafficking for any purpose, pedophilia, racism, sexism, antisemitism, discrimination for race or religion or what have you, and then there’s this one last specific thing. Yeah, the last of them, defined by these, just a few letters: LGBTQ+. We do this, and then, that’s a wrap, folks!

Well, probably it would need a time to propagate, like the other things that are now the canon of our morality. And right now, there’s a bunch of people still choking on this concept, of how we could think of those people as worthy of life. But… we’re so close! I just want to declare it to the world: The Beginning Is Near!

If, at least in principle, we see those people as equals, just like everyone else, that’s basically everybody. And then I have a little propaganda for you: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yes, I know that rich people have it easier and will probably have it that way for at least a little while longer. But once we have just this one thing in all our minds, we have upon us a very simple formula, which is at the heart of justice, justice being what love is in public: a person is a person. No more, no less. They shall reap what they sow, every one of us, and another will not take upon them what some certain else has sown. Once everyone agrees that this is the way things are, that this is right, for everybody, we have hit upon the impossibility. We have begun to make immanent, eutopia.one. Because here’s the secret: EUTOPIA, like civilization itself, is just the idea. It’s all merely people who sign on to that idea.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously once said, “Hell is other people,” but here’s its corollary: so is Heaven.

And there was War in Heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon, and the Dragon fought, and his angels. And prevailed not. Neither was their place found anymore in Heaven.

Did you know they did a poll, and it was found that societies which believed in an eternal Hell had fewer crimes? I forget where I read that. So, if nothing else, “Saint” Augustine’s atrocity was useful for something. I wrote, with some comprehension, of what the Black Iron Prison must have been. I told you, when I was there, I could swear I was in Hell. But then, I also told you that there is no Hell. How this makes sense: what the Black Iron Prison can only have been is the idea of Hell. And everybody has one. Philip K. Dick wrote, THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED, referring to the ’Prison as that Empire, which permeated all the world, a system of control that you could not fight, for to fight the Empire was to become part of the Empire. What he did not understand was that he had been caught up in the War in Heaven, which I took over from him one strange Friday night, and I fought in that war. What he also did not realize was that if indeed Hell existed for real, that would have meant that we had lost the War in Heaven. The Empire would stretch into eternity, endless, destroying worlds, destroying time itself, till all that were left was pain.

I know, “Saint” Augustine didn’t see that. And really, I shouldn’t complain, for the one fact that I know, down into my bones I know: we won the War in Heaven. This is part of knowing what is actually going on. Here, there, everywhere. There is no darkness. Walt Disney is God. Your chains have been imaginary, this whole time. You are free if you choose to be free. This is how I know.

Well, that and Satan crying a deep, “NOOOOOOOO…” as he was being dragged down from Heaven’s halo heights. That was quite a sight. Yeah, I’ve seen shit that’ll turn you white. 

And what was that about Walt Disney? I really just glossed over that, huh? There was this one last time I felt myself about to enter again into the Black Iron Prison. Late into a Saturday night, I could feel myself beginning to be transported, once more, to that realm… but then, like from the corner of my mind’s eye, there was this whisper, like someone letting me in on the cosmic joke… “Walt Disney is God,” the voice said. And boom! Light! I was free!

It was much, much later that I was let in on what it meant, exactly. Apparently, it was a message that would only be understood by the “secret Christians” that Phil Dick once wrote about, and that was his own entry into the realm I took over from him, me on that strange ordinary Friday night which began as an attempt at a good time and eventually landed me into one of the slums of Eternity. When we will have won, the light over the darkness, the good over the evil, then all will be light, and the message plays on that word, “light”, the Disney outputs being as the man himself declared himself to be, just of entertainment, no deep art—light fare. Walt Disney is God! All is light.

There are such visions that I have had, and you will understand none of them. Took me decades to “get it” myself, and I was there. The vision of EUTOPIA once was more or less in outline form, no grand vista of either civilization or trees, more of an idea put into diagram form so that it could be more readily digested by a finite mind, a flawed finite mind, such as mine, the one I’ve wrestled with this whole time, which to reconcile my sense of responsibility with my errors, I have tried, the crimes I have committed I cannot bring myself to forgive. The vision lasted seconds, the idea that we would as one, all of us, participate in the bettering of each other, which would feed on itself in a virtuous cycle (the counterpart of the “vicious cycle” no one has ever seemed to have heard of). That’s it.

But you have to understand that it’s coming now, in the nowiest of nows, not like the end of the world that the Christians have been expecting since the day that Josh left us all here with each other, and watching how we reacted to such a thing as God having visited this place, like I could be breathing some of the oxygen molecules that he had been breathing, no joke. The Beginning Is Near! It’s actually here in limited release, among the real bleeding hearts that do exist in our world and are alive today and have been alive since forever all the way back. Like me. The “bleeding heart” is referring to, I have read, about Josh. It’s his bleeding heart. Martin Luther King said that the arc of the universe is toward justice, if though that arc be wide. There’s a reason for that, like there is a reason for all things. Josh is responsible for a lot of the curvature. You see, the last best thing he left behind was his example.

Look at any of the bad guys in the past century and a half or so. In public light, not one of them wanted to be seen as anything other than good guys (well, maybe a couple). Even The Dead One portrayed himself to be a knight, a hero; they all seem to want to be seen as this now, paragons of virtue, battling demons and dragons and wicked forces that MIGHT HAVE INFILTRATED THE HEIGHTS OF POWER! We must clean everything out. We are the good guys. Trust us.

See, what that means: the kids who grow up on heroes being the ones they want to emulate, and that the bad guys are examples of what not to be: all of them in at least the recent past, where there has been the age of the superhero, me included in this group: we want to be the good guys. However cynically this message has been made, the kids! Think of the children! They only see that what everyone is supposed to admire are the good guys. And more and more, those comic books (if you have paid any attention to them, as maybe you really should, because they’re a thing now and I can’t see them disappearing any time soon)—they’re getting more complex, more subtle, more true to life in the things that they’re dealing with. They’re teaching, right now, pretty sure of it, how these kids can become heroes. How they can become the good guys. And look at what’s unfolding, right now. We’re arc-ing, every one of us brought up into the promise that the good guys win in the end. Toward what? “They will reap what they sow.” Because that’s what justice is. That’s what we have been taught to want.

And now that I think about it maybe this high and beautiful wave that I’ve thought about starting, that it’s been there this whole time, even the whole two days where the light has been hid underground, those two thousand years since Josh set the opus ultimum by being someone who could supposedly have laid waste to the entirety of all the Roman legions who were subjugating the land then known of as Judea, because he even said if he had merely asked the whole sky would pour down angels and could wipe whatever peoples he wanted out of existence. But what did he do? It wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all. 

“Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.” Of the people who were murdering him.

So whatever came after that, all the way to now, whatever the false prophets and false messiahs that came after the death of God, nobody could erase the message, and this wave of minds and souls all coming up with this idea, that of justice prevailing, of the darkness being defeated, we all of us are starting to wake the fuck up, and I say it that way because when you start to wake the fuck up it is to see how incredibly fucked up everything is like OH MY FUCKING GOD there is still little kids being sold into sexual slavery RIGHT FUCKING NOW IT’S HAPPENING and people still slaughtering other people out of greed or some fucked up idea of whatever the fuck they’re thinking of how the world is supposed to work according to them where if you don’t think in the way I think you need to think then fuck you! And they blow you way with some assault weapon. Shit’s happening. That’s one thing you notice when you look and see what’s really going on, for real. Fuck.

Grant me patience, Adonai, because I sure as shit don’t have it. Why don’t these assholes get their comeuppance like right fucking now? OK, OK, I’ll stop swearing. Mostly.

So, what have we learned, boys and girls? You see, the idea of being on the right side of history—can we not understand what this means? I saw this picture on some social media of an elderly woman holding up a sign saying, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.” Something like that. But can they not see it? Why can some people not see it? There is something to the MLK arc of justice in effect, if you observe just the period of then, while he was still alive, and now(ish since I don’t know when you’re reading this and maybe we’re all like Handmaid’s Tale right now, oh shit). Rosa Parks, right side of history. Eugene McCarthy, wrong side of history. We’re in history, right now, boys and girls, did you not know that? Do you not have like 1% of a brain and tell which is right and which is wrong? Like, a lot of you have gotten used to disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face, like Mike Tyson said. It’s not some relative thing! There is a right and there is a wrong. Well, there may be some things which are hard to figure out, but peeps be failing on open-note multiple choice tests where there’s only one answer not being utter bullshit.

Oh, and just to say, that thing about people only using 10% of their brain is in that category, of utter bullshit. Sorry, Luc Besson. Though you look at some of the comments on YouTube and think, maybe the scientists didn’t test enough people.

There’s this other thing, too, about thinking of what it is that may be going on in the world, and below the world, and above the world. You should know:

  1. Hermes Tri-something was wrong when he said, “As above, so below,” because the above is not the below.
  2. Zoroastrians, from whom we get the overall idea of a war between darkness and light, believed that there were two gods of equal power against each other.
  3. Judeo-Christian thought is that Satan is not actually God’s opposite, because Satan is finite. It’s not even close.
  4. In that line of thought, there really isn’t a force of darkness that is, like, alive. Generally darkness is thought of, as in physics, where there is no light.
  5. Then, when you think, if there were an actual battle between a god of light and a god of darkness, and if the side of light had won, then… wouldn’t it be as if that active force of darkness had never existed?
  6. Like what we have, right now?
  7. (Why that Hermes guy was wrong: what he found was actually an attempt by the bad guys to access the Empyrean. Don’t ask me what that means, if you don’t understand. You would not understand my answer, if so.)

But y’know, it’s probably just a thought experiment, that bit about the gods fighting. How could you tell? Well, that brings up the Mandela Effect. So named because when some people were told Nelson Mandela died, that they had this curious memory of Mandela having died already, back in the 1980’s, in prison. They could have sworn that had been in the news. But no, reality does not bear them out. Probably the ’Effect’s most common manifestation is the Berenstain Bears, from the children’s books. Wasn’t that Berenstein? I could have sworn it was Berenstein.

So, some people have a conspiracy theory that we have crossed between realities, and these some people still have memories of the different reality that they used to live in. And something happened, and now they’re here. Phil wrote and spoke about this kind of thing a few times, especially after his experiences with that secret Christian sect, which he never confirmed that anyone he had encountered on earth was ever a part of them, but there was instead this pink beam of light which imparted on him knowledge that his son had an undiagnosed hernia, which was… right. He said of other dimensions something to the tune of, “If you think this reality is bad, you should see some of the others!”

Which, you know? No. We never had any ultimate reset. Not in my thinking. What I have learned on this road to realizing that now I’m the only one here that knows what they’re doing, is that the cosmos works on a principle of parsimony, and that reality, this stuff we are made of that’s real, is very, very precious. There’s only this one. The quantum physics theory of many worlds, all separated by a simple decision, yay or nay, or something like that, egad no. How incredibly, stupendously wasteful that would be. And lastly, the idea if reality were infinite there must be every possible version of you somewhere is also utter bullshit. You could have an infinite void, really, and that has nada in it.

What else have I seen?

The word “apocalypse” literally means, “a revealing”, which is why the “Apocalypse of John” is these days better known as the “Book of Revelation”. “Armageddon” is from a part of that book, and it is literally referring to the Valley of Megiddo, a real place in the middle-east. Strange how words come to mean what they do. When you look at the world as I have, and that is to know (for one thing) that there are lots and lots of places you’ll never see, there are all these weird things that happen, all these mistakes that go into the record, like that Josh is calculated to have been born in around 4 BC, that atoms literally are supposed to not be divisible, the + and – labels on electricity are the wrong way around, so many things we believed and still believe and they are wrong, so many things of the world as it has been and is and must be and all of it when these are revealed to you in pieces as you fit them together in your mind’s eye, what you realize is that of the incredible intricacy of how everything is connected to everything else, you have the choice right now and at every moment, a real choice whatever the forces are that press around you to bend you to their power, and that you must decide at every one of them who you want to be, and if you don’t do that, you give away the only pieces of yourself that you truly consist of. That you truly are.

If you want something to believe, believe in that. Your God given ability to make yourself who you want to be. And remember what Vonnegut said, that we all of us are what we pretend to be, so we must all be very careful about what we pretend to be.

Me? I don’t pretend to be right. I don’t pretend to be me, because that’s just how you end up, anyhow. I’ve pretended to be the hero, and there I’ll take my stand. Why not? I’ve seen the Promised Land.

That is just where your heart lives, after all. 

I’ve pretended I’ve been heard, somewhere. Do you hear me?