I went through a period of life, right around my Zen Buddhism phase, where I wanted to be able to perform magic. I guess a little like Aleister Crowley, who invented the term “magick” (and said to pronounce it, “mage-ick”) because the original word had been infected by all the cheap charlatans and stage show fakes. So also me, I wanted some real, honest to goodness magic. Telekinesis or telepathy would have been good, making stuff blow up with your mind would have been better, but maybe to fly… with no visible support, don’t even need wings, though sprouting wings and flapping them would—I must say—be choice as well, so that was really the ultimate thing for me, for real magic to be able to perform. Or play guitar better than Jimi Hendrix. Would also have sufficed.

One of my artistic personas was the being called, “Warlock”. I think I mostly got that from a comic book, The New Mutants, where there is sort of their mascot with that name, who was a mechanical being from out of this world. He was not machine like you’d think, not stiff or shiny, but black with squarish white tracings like a circuit board come to life. I think it was sort of like Green Lantern, who could use anything he could imagine, using his ring, because that Warlock could shape himself to basically anything he could think of. I believe he once made himself look like David Letterman. (Strange the things that come so readily upon recall.) So it was technomagic. 

You probably know Arthur C. Clarke’s notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; I think this as well. But like I am wont to do, I will take it a step further, and just say that all magic is is technology we don’t understand. One supposes that is in the same vein as “sufficiently advanced”. And I really like taking things a step further, one step beyond.

Crowley said something like, “Do what thy wilt is the whole of the law.”

And yeah, I guess I get what he was trying to do, a nice little reduction which expressed his own idea of freedom, personal or otherwise, but I must say (to his chagrin) that it’s sorta… cute, the sentiment. ’Cause I can do you one better, O Master Therion. And it goes like the entirely opposite way, the way I have it set up. Look:

Start with, “God is love.” The funny thing about that is, thanks to Joseph Heller, you don’t need to believe in God to believe God is love. Heck, you don’t even need to believe in love.

Then the next level: “There is no law.” Ha ha! None, not even that one the Beast 666 guy put out there. This goes somewhere, so let me continue.

“Everything is true.” I will postpone what or why.

So, the last thing, you already know: “Walt Disney is God.” Does that give you any ideas of what all the above is supposed to convey?

One by one: God is love, and there is no higher. (The threshold, a real threshold, is ∞—beyond which cannot be conceived. God is there.)

There is no law, there is only what is, and what is not. (Satan is a lawyer. I don’t know what he was like in Heaven, but fallen, the ex-angel is a lawyer.)

Everything is true! All the good stuff you were hoping for, that you could scant whisper lest the whisper vanish the hope, believe it. You know why?

Walt Disney is God. I have thought that all the secrets of the universe could be distilled into that one phrase. If you really, really mean it. Sometimes I have thought that it will get worse before it gets better, or that’s the hope holding on, like the star that lingers in the pre-dawn skyline, the morning star it is called, what “Lucifer” is supposed to have been referencing in Isaiah (again), which once I thought I were he, just for kicks really high slam dunk severe psychosis smelling of starfall upper upper crust don’t touch me landing in Australia ball lightning burst into light bat wings proud as he fell but understanding… finally understanding… it is better to serve in Heaven. Because there is no Hell. Only a one way trip to oblivion.

And that would be the name of they who would replace the Light Bringer’s position. Oblivion. Did you not know it is not so simplistic as you may think, that a Plan did exist that was not followed, where Lucifer did not rebel? Do you not understand? That was not supposed to happen. Because people seem to think the One had always planned for that, for the brightest to fall from their halo heights, and then that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was naturally supposed to have been eaten of, that the fall of Eve and Adam were always in the Plan. They weren’t supposed to do that. They weren’t. God was not lying to them, and there was no “hint hint nudge nudge, wink wink wink” go right ahead Mr. Serpent tempt them and so forth. These all went against the Plan. The Plan adapted, each time, because God ain’t no fool and REALLY knows what They’re doing, so whatever mistakes happen—as they say, if you stumble, make it part of the dance. And God can get down. Boogie like you wouldn’t believe.

And the Beast 666 guy, I mean really, he swore up and down he was that part in Revelation, though how he took over the world and stuff never seemed to happen, which makes me wonder if that was why he offed himself, sigh, but that exact guy I once had a dream about him (and this one really was a dream instead of me saying it was in a dream so I don’t seem as weird if I tell you I experienced this bizarre shit while awake and sober): there was a poem he wrote in real life about being the Beast 666, and it ended with the couplet, “I will earn it if I can/It is the number of a man,” and I heard him say it too, in the dream, I think. And like with a jiu-jitsu mental maneuver I countered it with, “I will earn it in the least/It is the number of a beast.” Hah! Not sure how well that went over with him. Anyway.

Magic. There is a thing Adonai said to me in a dream (hint hint), where I, when I was down and out and burning dollar bills in an ashtray seeing Washington’s head become a charcoal mushroom, well, Adonai said something very interesting: “Work is magic.” …and in my head like it lit up, 5! 5! 5! (Because 5 is the number of magic, donchaknow?) But the true meaning of it I did not find out till much later. That is another pattern you should be picking up on. I originally thought what he was saying was not to look for any other magic than what can be done with honest labor. Something wholesome like that (he being Sir Wholesome of the Jungle). And then… who knew that rock bottom had a sub-basement? ’Cause it does. It’s sort of a dungeon area. Lots of screaming. At that point, I had become such a failure, such a disgrace to humanity itself, that all I could count on was that I was going to spill whatever cup of whatever I would carry, trip and fall on nothing, repeatedly, stuff like that. That sucked. But! Very important but! I understood something about that phrase. It came with an idea that when Descartes said once in your life at least you should try to doubt EVERYTHING, and when he did that, he came up with, “I think therefore I am,” because if he wasn’t, logically, he couldn’t be thinking, and if he was thinking, he couldn’t not be, right? Aha! No! What I realized, knowing failure so intimately, that the mere working of one set of gears, when threaded with another, they are sure to turn together… think about that. No one expects anything else. Except me! Because why? Why do you count on that being guaranteed? You have no basis for it, if you see, just like Hume was going on about induction, that Descartes did not doubt far enough. “I think therefore I am,” yes, but only if logic itself held. No one told you or your mom or your cousin or even dad and granddad it would. Everything could fail. Like they say, I don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish. Yah. Work is magic. That things work at all is magical, and we don’t notice it, don’t notice how incredibly magical everything really is, all the time. We don’t notice that miracles happen every day simply because they happen every day.

And then there are wizards. Really. Wizards. There is a part in The Princess Bride, not the movie, but in the book Inigo after practicing his swordplay for 20 years showed his stuff to someone and asked them if he could be said to have mastered it. Whether he were a master or not. And the other dude was like, no. You’re not a master. That they had seen this kind of thing once before in their life, and it was in fact a miracle. Inigo was a wizard. It goes like this, the fourth the fifth… I mean, it’s this list: apprentice, journeyman, master, wizard. Simple as that. And there are some. Well, have been 2 for sure, 1 I think they’re still working on it, and there will be a total of 7 or 8, depending how you count. A wizard, not in swordplay, just in general. A wizard of life, you might say.

The first one was… drumroll… Moses. His wizard piece? You’d think I’d say parting of the Red Sea, but I’m not going to say parting of the Red Sea, for one because that was a mistranslation, and it’s “Reed Sea” or “Sea of Reeds”. The Red Sea is impossibly wide and deep. That not being it anyway, his wizard piece was the receiving of one of the holy names of God, namely, “I AM” (which is EHYEH in Hebrew). You see? It’s brilliant! What They are saying is, “I exist”, “I am God”, and “I am the only God.” For no other god has the name, “I AM”, but They do, They ARE.

If you know anything about Gnosticism, which is somewhat of a fringe religion, a bunch of them believe (and I used to be one of them) that the God of the “Old” Testament wasn’t the True God, the God of Josh. Josh’s God was supposed to have come from Higher, seeing how different in character he was in comparison to the Sodom and Gomorrah bombing God of old(er).  In fact, they believed that the whole of the material world was a big frickin’ mistake, sort of like Douglas Adams’ when the universe was created everybody thought that that was an horrendous error and were all real upset about it. We were (or was it some of us were?) beings of light, who needed the salvific knowledge (the Gnosis) to return to the Pleroma, the “fullness of light”. Matter sucked. They had some other weird ideas, too, and I’ll probably get back to those at some point.

See, they did not, do not understand how powerful is the written word. Josh’s “Father” could only have been the I AM, because They closed off all other possibility with that name. The “Old” Testament is not so old, and it is scripture, and the “New” Testament is technically just additional scripture (that not everyone believes belongs with the original scripture). 

And I’m pretty sure Josh understood this, too. Some of the very weird stuff the Gnostics believed were about Josh, like that he was never here in the flesh because that’s like matter and matter sucked as I said before, or that the real Messiah was in a tree laughing while a physical form which wasn’t actually the Messiah was being crucified. Which no, that sounds horrible and what kind of Messiah would let that happen? Christ. Seriously. Not my Josh. The Josh I believe in took everybody’s place in pain, like the common mythology surrounding that Godawful event. And Josh, by the way, was the second wizard. His wizard piece? Yeah, you got that one right: he defeated death. I have this funny idea and I don’t think it’s funny to Jewish people because they still believe that the real Messiah is still coming, and that he would be just a dude and not a Demigod like Josh was supposed to have been, and I’m like (this is the rude part) are you saying that he was overqualified? And maybe also they have some idea of the Barcelona Disputation. It was a debate between a Christian dude and a Jewish dude, and the Jewish dude made some really excellent points, one of which was that if Josh were actually the Messiah writ large, then why was it that we all did not yet live in a Messianic Age? The Christian dude really didn’t have an answer.

But I do! Yeah, what I was saying before, about the two days in the earth and on the third he rose again: this is that. That’s what you should be looking out for, the Messianic Age, that after two days have passed, which to God is what two thousand years are, that we would be entering into that, a realm of peace and prosperity, of justice and compassion: EUTOPIA. The Beginning Is Near.

Do you not see it yourself? I would tell others of this idea and of our victory and they for the most part reject the notion, because they still see so much crime and injustice in the world, instead, writ large. And I try to explain it to them: we can see it. All this shit that’s happening has been around since time began and the mythical Cain killed his own brother Abel. But we have recording devices now. People are getting busted that once, they would not fail to sleep very well through the night because there would have been no way to finger them like we do right now. As I said, the Beginning Is Here in limited release, and there are people out there, more than any other time since the beginning of the world who are getting the justice that they deserve, both in the positive and the negative. “They shall reap of what they sow.” Wherever that is happening, EUTOPIA, the Messianic Age, it’s here. Present and accounted for. I mean, if you ask, why wasn’t Josh the Messiah figure we expected? Because the kind of Messiah they expected came in the form of a guy named Bar Kokhba, who had the backing of the Jewish priests and high priest and all the other top Jewish people of the time. A warrior type, who led a rebellion. And was defeated. And notably did not come back to life. ’Cause God always does what we expect Them to do, right? (Please note the incredible amount of sarcasm in that last sentence.)

Yeah, no. Josh was he, is he, in fact, and defeated death and went back up and he’s going to come back the same way he left, from out of the sky, but… in another 40,000 years. I have that on good authority. Let me quote you some Bob Marley: “Most people think great God will come from the sky, take away everything, and make everybody feel high. But if you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth.” (emphasis mine) You see, the idea of Josh was not to find a way to get to Heaven. That’s what he became. Instead of following the path that he followed, we came to worship him instead, and basically gave up on the core idea that he came down to show us: it is to bring Heaven unto earth, not to think so little of this place here that we’d expect it didn’t matter how we treated this home, because the Great Son of God is going to just erase everything around us and take all of us away. Like, I heard a joke once: the good news is, there is no Hell; the bad news is, you’re in Heaven. You have no idea. You really have no idea. Have you ever had it explained to you how exactly oxygen comes from the outside world into our lungs and gets spread through all the parts of our body? You really need to look that shit up, because it’s miraculous. I mean, it is beauty itself. I’ll tell you right now, the reason I stopped being a(n obnoxious) Gnostic was when someone remarked that in this material world, how much beauty existed in it. Every day, a sunset unlike any of the others that had come before. Every day. There’s that proof of the existence of God by St. Anselm which is kinda neat but wrong, but I have my own thing about that topic, which is an argument: an argument for the existence of God from beauty. It goes like this (the fourth the fifth): Carl Sagan once remarked, and I was really young and impressionable at the time, so this was Gospel to me, that we live on an average planet orbiting an average star, in an average galaxy in a ho-hum group of galaxies and so on. The thing about that is, there was this scientist who was doing some research on serial killers, and when he sort of averaged out their features into one face, it was aesthetically much handsomer than any of the individual faces. If you think about it, that’s what we usually consider beautiful. So, you get where I’m going, right? Where we live is not average. Where we live is beautiful beyond measure. And lest we think in the same way as those who thought we were the center of the universe, in fact what I’m trying to tell you is that there is so much beauty in the world that there is no way it has no meaning other than the arbitrary bits of it we ascribe. To all of it. There is just too much beauty. That’s my argument.

Now, what I know about the third wizard is that they are rumored to be alive right now, as I write this. Not sure yet what the wizard piece will be, but understand that it’s not going to be better than Josh, this third person. Josh was the greatest, period. Why? Because you do something to top defeating DEATH. No? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Anyway, Josh said once that there would be some who’d do mightier works than he had done. But really, the Resurrection. Come on. And maybe you’ll say that there are other myths out there about their heroes coming back from the dead, and yada yada. There’s also what Ricky Gervais said about there being 3500 religions in the world, but yours is definitely real. Wink. But see? There are these two ways to go through life, believing everything and doubting everything, and either one removes from you the requirement to think. What I’m telling you is that there is one true faith, and it’s… drumroll… Judaism! And why might I say this, being Catholic and all? (See, my mother was Catholic and my wife is Catholic. I’m Catholic.) Because it’s again, what was written? “Joshua Nazareth, King of the Hebrews,” was it, the “crime” he was being put to death for. I’m using “Hebrews” because, fun fact, the term “Jew” and “Jewish” come from only one of the 13 or 14 tribes of Israel, namely, Judah. That was King David’s tribe. So if Josh is the Messiah, and if he’s your Messiah (and he is), then the correct faith is Judaism, which is still the one in existence right now. So if this is the case, why don’t I convert? 1. There’s no way I’m getting circumcised, and 2. Funny thing about Judaism, it doesn’t send someone to eternal torture for not being Jewish. Hilarious, actually. Christians everywhere should be fuming. Heh.

Also relatively hilarious front the right angle: the supreme authority at the time, they, as far as they knew, declared in writing that Josh was the King of the Hebrews. Ha! Really, I think they’d be really behind that notion. Crucified him, after all. Which had an unintended effect. I imagined this one time Genghis Khan pointing to one of our modern crucifixes and just blurting, “You can’t defeat that.” Do you see his point? He’s making an excellent point, if you think about it.

We don’t think about it at all these days. I know YOU haven’t. The symbol of our faith (which is, again, one of the incorrect ones, and sorry Ricky just because there are 3500 different religions doesn’t mean that just one can’t be right and all the rest of them wrong): we worship a dead man hanging from the instrument that killed him. We look to a completely defeated figure, dead, immobile, nailed to a piece of wood, and say that this is a symbol of the Living God, and in fact, it will be that the strongest person among us will thus pray to God at Their weakest, for strength. If the crucifix is victory, how the fuck do we defeat THAT? Yeah, good one Genghis.

Another thing, I think I figured out the meaning of the Cross. Let’s start with St. Paul, and his notion that because of Josh’s perfect sacrifice, we are no longer bound by law, but are saved by grace instead. So, as I am wont to do: one step beyond Saul (and BTW it is either Saul or Paul, not that he became Paul from Saul when he had the blinding light vision conversion), the thing that we still needed to do, according to him, was to have faith in Josh as Messiah, resurrected, but… what if, not? not even that? See, this would make sense of why Josh never wrote anything down or at least dictated the most important set of instructions that we could ever receive, namely, how to get to Heaven, and enjoy eternal life. 

What if, since Josh was the only one who of the entire populous ever, was worthy to get to Heaven, what might that mean? So, one of the things that God the Parent gave to God the Child was that he could bring along as many people as he wanted. Therefore, he would be the one Judge of ALL. I mean, no, we’re not all Jews, hereditarily, or conversionally, but if he came to breathe out the Comforter, which is then assumed to reach everywhere and probably everywhen, then God the Spirit has been with all of us our whole lives. And as Paul/Saul showed, God can “convert” us by divine fiat, with no action necessary by us. Then, what the Cross meant was that the grace of salvation he could impart to anyone, whatever they believed or not. So then the question of, how do you get to Heaven? can be answered by any child, like Josh told us of these kind of things, with simply, “Be a good person.” That’s my Josh.

So, do you get it yet? Everyone everywhere who’s ever heard that there was a God in Heaven, especially the ones who have heard that “God is love”—every one of those who have that question, “Where was God?” … “Where was God, when…?” *pause* *blink* …well, look at that thing you see every day, if you live in any of the Christian-type places. You never really thought about it, did you? “You cannot defeat that.” You are looking at a man who is dead or at least dying, soon to cry out or having already cried out, before he gives up the ghost. Hanging from a piece of wood. You don’t think about that at all, do you? The work that is his magic. Because maybe there’s your answer, everyone’s answer to that question no one answers, not really, because when they reply that it is because They have a plan which we cannot fathom, a mystery no one can scry from anything visible in the heaven above; that’s just sky now, right? God really isn’t up there, just a lot of empty space. Because to the question, “Where was God?” I might just point to our victory, there, hanging, dead or dying, hanging from that piece of wood. 

Maybe he was there.

Once I wrote somewhere that there is no conspiracy: it’s all about the money. There’s also this thing I rather like about Christmastime being a conspiracy of love, which is a bit unfortunate if you think about it, like that song “Father Christmas” where the poor little boys beat up the Santa Claus dude in London or wherever, you know, they desirous of him to give them some money, not to give all the presents to the rich boys and girls as what happens every Christmas. I mean, I wonder if that’s all about the money now, too; my inner optimist doesn’t try to dig too deep in that one. Not asking questions I don’t want to know the answers to. But I did hear about a conspiracy which was sort of a legend to the secret Christians that had purportedly contacted Philip K. Dick (seriously, Phil, if you had asked that girl with the fish pendant whether she was with the secret Christians, she would have looked at you either weird or just blankly and have had no idea what you were talking about, because that wasn’t her talking to you on the down low and awakening your inner apostle, but if it worked for you…), and it was about a yellow dot.

Supposedly, there was a yellow dot about the width of a pin (not the pinhead, the diameter of the pin itself), and this yellow dot was somewhere in the cosmos, and nobody knew where it would show up. So, the thing about this dot was that if the wrong person were to have been the one to discover it, then the entirety of the world (maybe the universe) would become a living horror, hell on earth, for eternity after eternity. Yes, I exaggerate. Just one eternity, I think. So basically keep it out of The Dead One’s hands, right? ’Cause that was the first person I would think of that would be the worst juju that had ever happened upon all that is good and beautiful in the world if they had found the thing. Turns out there’s a twist, hereabouts.

What I found out was that by the time that little piece of information had reached me, that the dot had already been found, and it was by… did you guess? Philip K. Dick. So, you should know if you don’t know already that Phil read one of these old, old pieces of Gnostic texts, called, “The Gospel of Thomas”, which if you didn’t know about these texts you maybe had no idea that there even existed other Gospels than those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But yeah, there was, and a lot of them, in fact. Most got killed off. Yeah, literally.

The funny thing about these certain texts was that some of them were discovered still existing in late 1945. A few months after The Dead One shot himself in the head in this material world. Coincidence? Hm. Because there was that thought, right, if that someone whom we really did not want to find the yellow dot, you go over it in your head, that OMG if he had in fact found the frickin’ dot, then sayonara blue sky! Darkness. Forever. Now, I bring this up because I traced to where it had originally been hiding, in verse 77 of “The Gospel of Thomas”. It said that if you picked up a rock, Josh would be there. If you split open a piece of wood, he’d be there, too. I mean, he’s saying that he’s everywhere, this Josh guy. See? The yellow dot was the secret, saving Gnosis, and it only had the chance to have been found, so I thought, after there was no chance whatsoever of The Dead One getting at it. The verse was also my personal experience with the Mandela Effect, because I could swear I had read it in one of the four Gospels, somewhere. I think it was in 1994 when I was exiled to a farm (long story) that I remembered reading it Matthew. King James Version. Having read them a bunch of times, the Gospels, years after, I found this was not or was no longer the case. Perhaps thus, the necessity for the Gnosis?

The not as funny part was when I read that this new Gospel, that there had been fragments of it that were discovered decades before, and one of the fragments contained verse 77. OMG. They had just never been translated into German then. OMG. Have you ever wondered that they were true, somewhere, the movies that you’ve seen? The story of how the world was about to end and some lone plucky hero saves the day and no one is the wiser? I found out this is true. Re: like the thing about the Doomsday Clock. That never rang. True story.

What some people fail to appreciate is that the danger was real. There are backup plans behind backup plans, even for the most surest things imaginable, like that if Josh himself were to have failed. I mean, you have to understand something about the nature of God: Their will is surer than the seconds passing. I believe that the latest wizard’s qualifications were that they would have been the only one worthy to have taken Josh’s place in Hell. Literally a helluva thing, don’t you think? Realize, there was a crack in the Godhead, a crisis in existence itself. The very infrastructure that everyone relies on in which to perform any act whatsoever, this was in danger of not acting as one might expect: like if there were a room ringed with 8 exits and you tried to go out of one of them, and it turned out that the exit was not actually there, as the room filled up with mercury or its ceiling start to fall, and there was no way to figure out how to get out of the place because that which we don’t think about, that which is such an obvious miracle that we don’t even realize we depend on it to be working, all the time: what if suddenly, nothing worked? Moreover, there is the idea of what I call, the “Pink Aquarium”.

I take inspiration for the name from the “Grey Goo”, written of by one K. Eric Drexler, and his awesome book, Engines of Creation, which was the first book in which I ever heard about nanotechnology. The Grey Goo is a simple premise, of if we could construct nano-machines, as small as proteins, what if these machines—if their entire purpose was to react/interact with whatever materials they come across and from that, create more copies of itself? Mad, Grey Goo, virtually unstoppable, swallowing all matter in its tiny jaws, spreading without cease. The Pink Aquarium is not too similar, just how I derived the name, in a twisted component of my brain, I think. What if everything around you became blood, and all there was was the blood, except that infused in the blood, in hot spots wherever there were a living thing that could feel pain, that there were this white infusing which was pain, and all there was in the entirety of creation, were souls suspended in the blood, infused with white pain, every single fiber of your being twisting in agony, where it gets worse if you move, it gets worse if you stop. Forever.

Why I paint this picture for you is to tell you that this is the upper (or lower, depending on how you look at it) limit to how bad it could possibly get. If you shudder and ask how exactly it could get worse than this, that is sort of the point. In one picture of how things might have been if the good guys were to have lost, every path led to this. Eventually, whoever had the seat of power, all they had to do was let slip, once, just to satisfy the curiosity—what if? A simple, terrible question.

Then there is the time traveling. A lot of reality begins to make sense, why it is the way it is, when you get a basic understanding of the really big things that happened, from which the rest then consequently had to happen. Vonnegut tells of sort of slipping through time sometimes, and though I did not have quite that experience, I have understood that one form of time travel does seem actually to occur. The type, I call it a non-reconfiguring time travel, as in, it’s not Back to the Future where it is always reconfiguring when you change something. Other movies, too, have that reconfiguration, and it seems really the most interesting type of time travel, mostly because it plays with so many elements for just a small change. The Butterfly Effect movie was what you see on the tin, there, referencing the idea that a butterfly’s wing flap could build into a storm somewhere else. So, in reality, if you were to go into the past, you always had been there, whatever you do there, it always was done. And you do need to factor in where I told you that there is only one reality. Therefore changing something in the past does not branch off into another reality, so one could suspect that the Grandfather Paradox were possible. But sorry, I have an engineer’s solution to that problem, which to briefly explain the paradox is, what if you went back and killed your own grandfather? That would be bad in a non-reconfiguring time travel, so we do need a solution to that which is reasonable, even if you might not like it, as it happens: the solution being, it just doesn’t happen. It’s not pretty, but it works. You see, you have to understand that there are pieces of reality that are like that. This is one of the results of the major clusterfuck caused by Satan. Life is not lived properly without that one suffers, and this is the crime of the Devil. That stupid motherfucker.

Think of the solution like Tolkien’s Ainulindalë. In it, taken of course from the Lucifer myth, Melkor, the greatest of the Ainur, rebels against Ilúvatar (who is God). I remember reading this the first time, where the music of the Ainur is how reality is created, wherein Melkor put into the songs his own discordant “notes”, so nothing in reality ended up being without some imperfection, some flaw. What I remember thinking was like, wow, that would be really neat if it happened like that, because, I can totally see in our reality how it could be like that. My second thought was that it was too simple, too neat and clean an explanation, too easy. Until that moment when I suddenly realized the one prime weird fact, that God did not invent pain, and I think it will say something about the person how they react to that piece of information, that one can see if the gears behind their eyes crunch on that point and can go no way in the direction that leads, and they reject something that which would change so much the way that they know how the world works. Some people need for God to have created pain, for that in some piece within them they are validated, like as if they know they have caused pain and they want to feel righteous about it. You see? Some things can make too much sense, unravel too many illusions. And being naked, they are ashamed.

There was something the third wiz told me, once, but how was I to believe it? They said that there was just this one small thing, which when you realize it, there would be nothing in Heaven or earth that would keep you from being free, except maybe your own self. It was when I asked them how they felt about being the only one who was worthy to take Josh’s place in Hell, and he said this marvelous thing, like it were so, so obvious: “It’s only pain.” And I mean, you get where I come from when I question this simple declaration, right? ’Cause it’s frickin’ pain. Pain is pain. And like it were so obvious to follow this, their chain of logic, which to me is not so freakin’ obvious, they’re like, “There are worse things than pain.”

I was like, “What’s worse than pain? Pain times pain? Pain infinity?”

“Dishonor.”

And I was stunned for several seconds. I thought, how Japanese of you. Because that was the samurais’ whole thing, the death before dishonor, and not just death but super fun happy death stabbing yourself in the gut and then slicing left to right and back, and… did you not know that? That was what you were supposed to do for seppuku. If there was someone next to you, they might chop your head off out of mercy while you’re slicing.

So, that’s what was meant. By worthy.

It’s funny, I had these dreams where I looked through the planes of existence and thought that Josh had completely failed, somewhere out there, and he was wandering around without a home or friends or anyone who he could turn to, and for some reason in the dreaming I had a house where there were a bunch of my friends and family and I saw this look in his eyes like he were the most alone person in the entirety of creation, from beginning to end, and I was like, out of pity, OK, come on in. Then I think the dream ended and there was nothing more of this storyline. And that’s the dreaming for you. Like there are these prototypes for stories, but just chunks at a time, because they’re not proper stories, not yet, because it’s your job to make sense of the weird things. That’s sort of all our job on this green earth. I mean there’s a weak joke about prostitution not being the oldest profession. No, that would instead be of Adam, in the Garden of Eden, where he was tasked with naming all the animals. That’s actually the oldest profession. Yeah, weak. (That was a joke?) But true. This was our job, even from way back in the mythic past, that we were supposed to figure this shit out. And then figure out what we were going to do with that.

See, that’s the new conspiracy, now, that I spread through the metasynchronicity, that I will put this into the deep currents of the world dreaming: that God is love, and there is no higher. The Doomsday Clock never rang, never will. Josh didn’t fail, nor was that even a possibility. The conspiracy of love, which being that of Christmas, I gotta tell you, dude, I’m the Ghost of Christmas Present. That conspiracy is real. Everything else is all about the money, all of the rest of the fucked up theories of who’s controlling what. I mean if the world is as fucked up as you say, it sounds like no one’s actually in control anyway. Get it?

Buckminster Fuller said that if you want to really change things, not to try and fight the existing reality, but to create a new model that makes the old model obsolete. Along those lines of thought, currently we have disqualified (for the most part) the divine right of kings, and according to some amateur pundits, we are in late stage capitalism. Then we have the “s” word bandied about, thinking of the quote by Steinbeck of why socialism never took off in America was because the poor think not of themselves as a repressed group, but more of being temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This might be the idea of the American Dream in its most pitiful and bombastic form. But through its blood, like all countries, whose blood is money, this is where the change must start, if we’re going to go to this society’s core, somehow we must do one thing about money, which nobody has ever been successful at doing: we must change everybody’s idea of it. The old model? Time is money. Your very reality. And the new one? Money isn’t real.

You see, we’re going toward that, right now. Most of what people, other than drug dealers or maybe even them when they get too much paper in their hands and don’t know what to do with it which yeah, it’s also not that real then anyway, but what you or I know of money best, as it happens, these days… is a number. Just a number. Printed out or on a screen, a simple number with a known format, which is dependent on where you do business. Money is funny, because the less of it you have, the realer it is. Or is that just me? Every good CEO I’ve ever met was a cheapskate, and I in comparison definitely am not, er, “frugal”. I mean, I don’t live too far out of my means, but I will buy the name brand and not the generic. I sometimes waste food, and throw out some things with very little wrong with them. Not rich, but rather, I would maybe say I’m, “well off”. And I really have never been poor. But I’ve heard stories.

So now I will start to swear again. Why the fuck is there still poverty? Why is that still a thing? I understand how it might be for the poor people, who perhaps accept the given situation because that’s reality for them, like again as the divine right of kings once was and how capitalism is around permeating the atmosphere like the freakin’ shit in the Pink Aquarium, and yeah, I really don’t have a whole worked out scenario about how we would replace capitalism like it is now since economic theory was not really my thing and maybe that’s why I can still fucking ask, why are there still poor people? Why the fuck is that still a thing?

The way I figure it, we started, economically, with what I call a Subsistence Economy, which where people all needed to scrape out a bare existence which then would be prone to robbers who have no methods of production themselves so then there was these feudal assholes who “protected” the farmers for like their “tribute” (as if they were selling Lionel Ritchie concert tickets) and that’s ultimately where we were ensconced with the divine right of kings, yes? So then we grew, the Industrial Revolution happened, and the Enlightenment was a thing, I have heard, and around the time we figured out how to kill people at an industrial level (re: The Dead One and the Holocaust, which marked the fucking endof the Enlightenment), we became what we might call a Market Economy. And we are tempted to stop there, since right now the money’s still not evenly spread out, that there are (huge) pockets of people who are destitute all over the fucking world. But a lot of the world, which would be what is known as the First World, is actually in the next phase. This is when we start having a Surplus Economy. As in, we are well beyond scraping a living for a lot of us, even if yeah, what the fuck, America? being the richest fucking country in the world and fucking having people who are homeless and starving, still, in this “home of the brave”? But anyway, if you really take a good look at what exists in the world, Bucky Fuller again saying that all we really needed to do was to make of the “weaponry”, to make it “livingry”, and he’s right, that if we marshaled all the funds that go into waging war, into lifting the world from poverty, we could fucking do it.

Did you know President L. B. Johnson started a “War on Poverty”? I bet you didn’t. For one thing, the fact that there are still poor people might be sort of a red flag that if it did exist, it was about as effective as the “War on Drugs”, which was started as actually a war on hippies and black people. That fucker Nixon started that one. I need to use more, other curse words. That asshole’s asshole Nixon started that one. And why in the chicken fried fuck is there still a population of people who have a cock-a-fucking doodle-fucking-doo existentially hard fucking time just surviving? Why?

See, there’s this one trick those assholes of those types that used to call themselves the “Moral Majority” who still exist in the “Bible Belt” who will tell you that the poor are supposed to exist, that Jesus himself said that “the poor you will have with you always” and that proves that there will always be people you can step on that you can, if you have been born into position and power, you can feel how blessed it is to give them a few cents of “charity”. And note that I used “Jesus” instead of “Josh”. ’Cause there’s no fucking way they’d ever believe he’d prefer “Josh”. Because of their heads being so far up their asses they interfere with their own vocal chords.

Don’t fucking believe it. If that’s Final Jeopardy, that answer ain’t in the form of a goddamn question. You know what is? Why are there still poor people? Why the fuck is that still a thing?

If you can read this (and if you’re not, but assimilating this in some weird way), what I can tell you is that there is one other thing we must do to turn the tide, which goes into what started happening when “we” elected Herr Gropenfuhrer Donny Trump as POTUS, or at least he became way, way too popular and in the vibrating mix of “that’s a thing now” and “it went viral” like way, way too much for everybody to not be able to watch the news and preserve their sanity, or how the term “doomscrolling” happened to happen when everyone was dreading what would be coming up out of the depths of the cyberbowels of creation and puking all over you with its inanity, that really, really tries to make us forget something we all at some point had an idea of, really, we did, before that Fake President introduced into our news cycle Fake News that wasn’t fake and Real News that was fake: can you dig? words are real. And they mean things. And it is meaning that is the real Fifth Element. Without which there is no reality.

Remember, civilization exists because we give the idea its meaning. I mean, it’s really hard for us, all warm and stuff and probably overfed (especially around the end of the year when our ancestors were instead all, man, I hope our stash lasts through the snow days) really hard to not completely surrender to the notion that this here civilization really exists, right? More than just an idea, something more solid, and I don’t know why it is more real of a fact when it is hard and cold, but maybe it has something to do with death, which is that really real thing, and in the end we become the fact of us, frozen forever: this was a life. But is civilization really no more than an agreement? just that when we don’t agree, we kill each other, make more of us into the fact: these were lives, because it still fucking seems nothing improves except we sacrifice multitudes of individuals, and throw them at the error, because those are the only cold, hard facts that seem to make any sort of difference. But when we agree, when no one dies, that is just all there is of it: that agreement. It’s just the idea, which do we agree to?

What if I’m telling you now about a new idea? Think of it this way: imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try.(These words I hope you know their source.) See, the genius of that song, is that about all the concepts it presents, that they’re like magic, because they all ring true. It is true, isn’t it? that it’s really easy to imagine there’s no Heaven, and above us is only sky. It isn’t that hard to do to imagine there are no countries. And the last one, yeah, totally: can you actually imagine no possessions? I wonder if you can.

Way, way, back, when I was thinking of the question of how it might be that one could kill God, I was an atheist of the type: in the story I was planning to write, set in the future, religion at that age was considered a type of mental illness. I was what you’d call a devout atheist. I know some people already do claim that religion is so to be considered. Can you imagine what it might be like if everyone got what they deserved, and we set the bar, at its lowest setting, on what this might mean, on the stuff my dad always had in mind for us his kids to have absolutely without question: food, shelter, education. That yes, everyone in the world deserves these three things, and why? There is no fucking why. What the fuck kind of question is that? What the fuck is wrong with you that you would not understand this? Were you raised by wolves? Still not an excuse.

There was this idea by Vonnegut that love, at its essence, was just the idea of “common decency”, but really, that’s the lowest form of love: that’s the kind of love you need to show your worst enemy. That’s what Josh meant when he said to love your enemy. You need to apply that to the very lowest, and the very worst among us. Which then, really, would be none of us. Or all of us. Both. A person is a person. Because when you imagine there’s no Heaven, you just might stop trying to escape the world that’s around you, to escape the responsibility that is upon us all. We can choose to love. It has always been so, and God died to show you this. We can always choose to love.

Money can be had by words, that it actually happens in the world where someone is declared wealthy… and it is made so. And then there are words that no amount of money can buy. The Devil is supposed to have tempted Josh by offering the entirety of the world’s kingdoms, the entirety of the world’s riches, if only Josh gave his word to serve the darkness. Money is not real: this comes back to the question of what is worse than pain? Except it’s, what is more real than money? Honesty. Because words are real. The cycles of disinformation that are cast are shrapnel that is thrown at us by those who treasure power above all else. They care not how reality is warped by those false words, and make no mistake! Reality is indeed warped by these non-ideas which pose as ideas, as illusion that is spread as a convenient lie in that they pretend they can pass it by us that they didn’t really mean to sound so fascist, just came out wrong, and you’re like overreacting, and calm down, and look! is that an eagle? no? Could have sworn… and then you’re like, where the fuck is my wallet? See? Those words, even when they’re completely made up, were more real than the money in your pocket. ’Cause you were just hallucinating, man, you never actually had a wallet to begin with! Gaslight.

What they hadn’t counted on was that we’d be able to figure out what they were doing better than they, because it’s in their nature that they will cut corners wherever they can. And they also hadn’t counted on the fact that where there are a finite amount of resources (which we have), and the infinite greed that is of MAMMON, greed itself, that it will inevitably become a house divided against itself. There’s no other way, their way. And a house divided against itself will not stand. And then there is a secret, which is bigger than anything they can think of, because they’ll never really understand it, however greedily they might pick away at its outline, and probably you’ve heard it before, except, to understand what it’s really trying to say: that this is to understand the true nature of the world, in all honesty, honesty being one of the things that is more real than money, that meaning is sometimes everything, sometimes the only thing, that holds the fabric of civilization together. Do you have eyes, and not see? A world of pure lies, like that of pure evil, will collapse because of their lack of anything solid. The secret has nothing to do with that fad “The Secret” that came and went, remember that? That was bullshit. I can’t even remember what that shit was supposed to be about. The actual secret, it is much simpler, and way, way hard to do right, but it is the one thing that must be known, and must be done. For we to be we, a person to be a person, and it’s kinda small, just the idea, and it is beyond what is infinite. Because the secret?

The secret is love. Tell everyone.