I’m crazy. I have a whole history that says so, a bunch of official documentation that collects in some inconspicuous file. And I know there has been some curiosity in the past about my experiences, as when I wrote that by looking at me you’d never guess that I routinely talk with angels. I do not fit one’s normal expectation of a sweaty-toothed wild man, who with a violent spark in his eyes proclaims the Apocalypse is nigh. I have definitely… seen things, though. Fantastic things. Silly things. Funny things. Terrifying things. Mundane things. Dreamy things. Sober things. Angry things. Joyful things. Dark things. Shining things. Simple things. Indecipherable things. Sad things. Things I won’t talk about. And I understand when people try and tell me that what I saw was not real, at least, not for the most part. But as for madness compared to madness, is someone who declares himself the President of Antarctica on the same playing field as someone who wears holes in the knees of his jeans from all his prayer? Yes, I’ve done that. The second thing.
I will tell you what I have seen. At the grand opening of New Jerusalem, quiet though it may have been, I overheard this great thing. I believe it was one of the victims of the Holocaust, sounded like a middle aged woman, talking to someone she knew, and she really seemed to have a handle on the situation. She said, “Hitler’s here. This must be good.” Which, I might point out, would be the best test of whether it is actually true that absolutely everyone is saved. And what she said struck me as so… other. Like something that wouldn’t cross my mind in a million years. A billion. A googolplex number of years. The universe would end waiting for me to come up with that. And it didn’t resemble any kind of hazy dream. It was a sober, straightforward assessment—the real deal.
Note number 1: It is so Jewish it’s called “New Jerusalem.” This is Heaven we’re talking about, from the end of the Book of Revelation. Ruled by the Son of God, Joshua of Nazareth, the Messiah. (Yes, he prefers “Josh” to “Jesus”.)
Note number 2: Who’s there, again? You know it, if that guy is there, that must mean everyone is there. Everyone is saved at the end, but there is the painful bit about the Lake of Fire 1/5 of the people and 1/3 of the angels experience. Just that in this scenario, after they’ve paid their dues, why not let them live, too? Sounds like the “Christian” thing to do.
Note number 3: What I actually saw was a fenced off portion of the “silver city” with a barrier between me and that speaker; I never saw her face, and I wonder if she would sound the same if I were to encounter her again?
You may ask if I am for real. What is reality? Beloved sci-fi writer and brother from another mother Philip K. Dick defined reality as that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away. I also have something vague that answers the question. What is reality? What works. Reality is somewhere between magic and the void, the technology of it is. The question is, was what I saw real or not? or a little from column A, a little from column B? (FYI, Philip K. had his own experience with a divine invasion. And I’m actually Thomas, if you know what that means.)
According to St. Paul, the world that is seen is only temporary, and it is the unseen world that is eternal. The latter would be what intersects with the dreaming, that has intruded into the mind’s eye of a prophet in question. It is not merely imagination, so to say. Myself, I am familiar with my own incontrovertible evidence that it is not just imagination. Hallucinations are one thing, but what happened to me: having had severe nearsightedness for the majority of my life, the “entities” I was in contact with in the spirit world (as if by pulling a lever somewhere) healed my sight. As in, 20/20 vision. And you can’t explain that away as any kind of psychosis. Try.
I don’t think anyone I tell that story to actually believes me. Thank you if you gave it your best shot. Things like that don’t happen, not to a rational human being, after all—a logical explanation would be more incredible than the phenomenon itself. People just shrug and put it in a pile of halfway considered questions, never to be visited again… I know of what I speak, having in the past been a devout atheist (and materialist), no room in the brain at all for any god or government to rent out. I had to hit rock bottom, or thereabouts, my soul battered enough that the cracks could let in light.
To contradict all the Christians who think they are the last generation (before the Apocalypse), I tell you instead that the beginning is here. What’s happening right now was prophesied in Isaiah, notably in 65:21-22: “They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.” [NRSV] It is a new realm we see that has at least a foothold on this good green earth, so very easily taken for granted. The manifestation of justice throughout the story of us: that all of us are subject to the same set of rules. We can and must be dedicated to this proposition, that all of us are created equal. True civilization is in our grasp, and hard-fought it was, verily.
Well yes, I am a prophet, and I like to say that I’m a prophet in the line of Philip K. Dick. Him again. My best friend in the Halospace I am privy to. At times, though, Jeremiah is comfort to me: “My heart is crushed within me, all my bones shake; I have become like a drunkard, like one overcome by wine, because of the Lord and because of his holy words.” [Jeremiah 23:9 NRSV] And these days, being like a drunkard in that wise gets you put away. True story—first hand experiences to such an outcome. I’ve definitely been written up in that official, sober documentation. No place for a prophet these days, not a real one. Though I must admit I am no hardline fire from the sky variety.
A lot of what I want to tell you you’ve heard before. Like “love your neighbor as yourself” was around for quite a while before Josh Messiah said it. “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love,” St. Paul writes. [1 Corinthians 13:13 NRSV] Further, what did Our Lord say about how we would know His followers? By their righteousness? (No.) By their purity? (No.) By their power? (No.) None of the above: you will know them by their love. You will know us by our love—and if we are not, do not love, we are surely not sent by Him. And one enlightenment (of many, one imagines), I call the Apostle’s Enlightenment: be not but love, do not but love. Which amounts to doing everything in your whole life out of love. Why not? Why on earth would you not do this, once you’ve found it out as an option? You know how the Beatles song goes, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you meant to be. It’s easy. All you need is love.”
And then, there’s something I spotted in the Halospace:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
–Martin Luther King Jr.
There’s also another quote I like, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” But the scholarship actually says that He was a tekton, being better translated as “day laborer”. I had an extended period of time where I was directly reporting to Josh of Nazareth, and I got this… feeling about life, the universe, and everything. [Thank you Douglas Adams, wherever you are.] If this is the Son of God, it’s done. We’re saved, all of us. He’s got this. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end—and if you think it seems improper to assign the properties of God to a man, you know why St. Paul, when he was Saul, persecuted the early Christians. Before he saw the Light.
You must know that there is nothing that “just happens”; it’s all planned out, it’s all foreseen, and there is work aplenty for all of us in this world and the next. If the other world, the spirit world is real, then there must be some common ops at work holding for all the visions that have ever been seen: they must all subscribe to a logos (a logic and ground). I call it the Accounting. But this Accounting is just half the picture: the seer brings from his own life and experiences the forms that the Accounting can take, in the form of visions. If they are not in touch with the Accounting, these are just hallucinations that they see, or if their touchpoint is not viable. You cannot actually say that everyone’s visions are not real, if any of the stories can be believed. For example, the Bible mentions when St. Paul had been blinded by the Light that one Ananias had a dream that told him to find the newly converted apostle.
Generally, people have visions when they are ready for them. There is a popular saying that God does not call the qualified, He qualifies the called. Yes, I can see what they’re saying there, but one imagines that when they are called, they have something in them to work with. It has always been so that the picture of the divine is dependent on the context in which it has been seen. And the Accounting: evidence for it lies in one common rule that all major religions have, as expressed in the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have done to you. This would be that arc of justice MLK was talking about.
Then there were dreams. Once I was in a mansion or inn, and I was trying to get something done there, like I were a hired electrician or something. I went from room to room, and each time I thought I knew what had to be done in that room, but I was missing any kind of equipment that I needed to complete my task. I remember that it was dim, and then I think there was the feeling that it was damp, like a rainstorm had just passed outside, and the air was still permeated with water. I remember that main thing I felt: I just couldn’t get anything done.
I was told later that I had been in Hell.
Kyrios (Greek for Lord, referring to Josh Messiah) once showed me something like a short slideshow of very strange visions. Think of a deadmau5 mask protruding in from a fourth spacial dimension. Very, very weird, stabbing you with cold emotive projection. He told me that that was Hell. Quite different from Dante’s Inferno. I didn’t understand it at first, but I was told, you didn’t see it while in pain. This was the Hell that the “bad guys” would be subject to while they were in the Lake of Fire. There is purpose to His punishment. The weirder things are actually therapeutic: they effect in the hellion the psychology they need to live peacefully in New Jerusalem. It’s literally burned into them. The Devil gets the worst of that treatment, consisting of some of the most of basic repairs to their psyches. Justice is done. Mercifully.