Some people don’t understand my generation’s obsession with Star Wars and comic heroes.
When I was about four years old, Star Wars came out. Now just try to imagine what kind of impact a masterpiece film like that would have on a four-year-old. Think about it; the world is new. You are new. You know nothing but what your parents tell you. All you’ve seen of the world is a few weird streets, some shopping marts, and a school you don’t like. You’re still not even sure who your Grandparents are, you’ve only seen them once or twice in your life that you remember. You’re still trying hard to figure out what toes are for.
Then suddenly one day, mom and dad take you to this dark mysterious building full of the smell of popcorn and candy and other seductive delights of the Dark Side, and suddenly the lights dim… and your brand-new, untouched, impressionable, clean-slate consciousness is permanently imprinted with the most mind-blowing experience you could have possibly had as a human being. You are suddenly in Outer Space, looking through a giant window of light that looks more real than the real world, and hearing Darth Vader’s theme-song rumbling your seat cushion with the power of the Force in spine-melting jaw-dropping ecstasy.
I swear, I don’t think I blinked for two hours. I certainly don’t remember breathing.
I lived a whole lifetime in those six hours it took to watch all three movies during my young childhood. I grew up in ways, in the corners of my mind, that I never imagined I would. I developed a hunger for fearlessness, power, courage, justice, respect, and a world worth living in. I saw the Rebellion and I knew it was my own; I knew if the world refused to change into a world we could be proud of, we could MAKE it change, even if we were just a little ragged force and the Empire looked vast and official and undefeatable.
But most of all, I loved Darth Vader.
Adults I talk to sometimes don’t understand why my generation latched onto the ‘bad guy’ so strongly. They saw the scene where Darth Vader is choking the life out of an underling using the Force and are horrified. My generation sees that and all of us uniformly grin in feral glee. Is it because we were permanently warped by our collective childhood awakening? No. It’s because as children we saw something in that great film that perhaps only a child could see. But watch out: children see things sometimes more clearly than adults do.
The fact that George Lucas himself didn’t understand his own inspired message was clear to everyone who saw his attempts as a prequel. He ripped Darth Vader apart and made him into just another pre-fabricated bad guy, and a pathetically weak one at that. An insult to the very name of Vader, like pissing on his funeral pyre. Obviously the entire revelation of Lord Vader had been completely lost on his creator. Perhaps Vader had been a message from God to Lucas trying to teach him a lesson that Lucas never learned.
The thing about Vader was that he was just as much the good guy, perhaps more so, than Luke was. In fact, nobody liked Luke. He was weak, sniveling, whining, a little spoiled brat child who reminded everyone of the kid who eats paste in the back of the room. There was no role-model there. As a four-year-old, I remember a vague sort of pity for him and a grudging sympathy that yes, everyone wants to get off of Planet Dirtball, and we were a little bit proud of him that he actually had some kind of mystic power that redeemed him from being a complete and total waste of flesh.
But that was all. Nobody liked Luke. Why? Because he was a coward. I suppose the story was supposed to be about him coming to grips with being a coward and getting over it, but from our perspective he was forced (no pun intended) to ‘get over it’ by pure circumstances, and never did it of his own free will. Thus, he never got over it in truth; he just somehow managed to grit his teeth and temporarily endure his obvious cowardice long enough to do a few ‘hero’ like things in the war, as if by accident.
But he was no hero; he was certainly nothing we wanted to follow. He reminded us too much of the rest of the ‘can’t we just get along’ whiners who would rather give you a flower than pull out a light saber; the proof was when in the end he threw his weapon away and refused to fight. Hippie. Bah. And we all knew that as soon as he got the chance, he’d crawl into a shack somewhere and become one of those old Nam War Vets who boobytrap everything, live in a bottle, and are afraid of their own shadow.
Luke, in our mind, was merely a mechanism of the plot who existed only to show off Darth Vader’s glory.
Totally the opposite of Luke, Darth Vader was literally the embodiment of fearlessness. He was the physical representation of power, magnificence, confidence, even justice and honor. He never flinched, he never feared, he never looked back. He forged ahead, a dark god in a universe that needed to be spanked real bad. And in the end, even his unshakable loyalty to his master (something we could totally understand) had to fall to his true heroism: doing what was right and killing the Empire itself in the form of the Emperor, and everything he represented.
Why did Vader represent justice? Because his nasty, sniveling underlings were so truly puerile, they deserved to be choked to death. We’d all seen snot-noses like those guys ruining our parent’s lives at work, and we dreamed of a Darth Vader coming to the office and doing the death-grip thing in order to give them what they deserved, and save our parents. Everyone my age knows to the core of their being that in this society, at least since 1970, there’s been no justice. The arrogant criminals get away with everything, and everyone turns a blind eye from bosses to city administrators, and your parents repeat like a chant that we have to “grin and bear it”. But Vader didn’t. Vader had a light saber, and knew how to use it. Vader was like the Angel of Justice, the Angel of Death.
And why honor? Because Vader always, always, always, did what he said he’d do. In an age when all of our fathers always lied about every promise they ever made, and no promise was ever kept, we knew that when Darth Vader swore that he would come after you and hunt you down, you were a gonner. We felt true love and admiration. Yes: here was a man who would do what he said. He was our father figure. Love, after all, is not kindness. Love is doing what is right, no matter what it costs.
My generation grew up in a world without heroes, without defenders. All of the men who were held up to us as “great” were just talkers and hippies. Martin Luther King Jr. might have impressed our parents, but all we ever saw him do was yell at people to be nice to each other. We learned that in Kindergarten. So what? This is our hero? The same old black and white worn-out clip, over and over. He sounds like our dad giving a lecture.
And the hippies were guys who invented… what… a new kind of eco-friendly toilet paper? A new type of fluorescent light? Some of them got Nobel Peace Prizes for something. I have no idea what the hippies ever did that was useful.
In other words, every adult in our world was blowing a lot of hot air about inventing esoteric stuff nobody needs, talking about making rocket ships, saying ‘why can’t we just all get along’ and pointing fingers at one another accusing each other of not being nice... while they all totally ignored the REAL problems. Things like crooks running all the businesses, and every boss keeping double books and overlooking scams. Things like landlords who could destroy you if they felt like it. Things like rapists and gang members on the streets so kids were terrified to ride their bikes home from school every day of their lives.
These were the problems no airbag or hippie could ever help us with. We needed Darth Vader; we needed him, his light saber, his unwavering determination to kill anyone who annoyed him, and his god-like invincibility. We could all imagine him taking on every freak on the face of the earth and just slaughtering them, and the world would be healed.
For the same reason, we loved the Terminator. These were our fathers. These were our heroes. These were the men we looked up to, the kind of men the boys wanted to become. The kind of men that don’t exist in our father’s generation. Fearless, knowing what just had to be done, and able to do it with mighty unstoppable power.
No rules, no red tape… every kid my age knows that the world-wide culture of bureaucracy and law only exists in this age to give the criminals a nice big webwork of cover, and to screw every single law abiding citizen until they have to pay more in taxes than they have food money for, so their families go hungry. Perhaps once, law was excellent and protected the people, but increasingly today law is becoming hypocrisy; again and again it ignores the misery of us, the normal people, and it spins webs of intrigue that cover evil men’s scamming everyone else. This is because the law is amoral, and headless; it has no leader and no police. Whomever is most clever makes policy, and the criminals are the most clever, so the criminals are the only ones who are not touched. Just look at the insurance system.
They say the law is blind; we saw that the law is a blindfolded marionette.
But Vader didn’t follow law. Neither did the Terminator. They ignored “keep out” signs, which shut us kids out of every place we could go to play and trapped us in a prison cell world. They did what we must not, what we can not; they were freedom, they were truth. They did what needed to be done at a fundamental human level, basing their decisions solely on their gut instinct, totally ignoring today’s crooked web of politics which is just a shadow of the law-web.
They were like Punisher, and Wolverine, and a variety of other comic “anti” heroes. They were of the people, they were normal people like us, tired of being thrown in jail or having our cars taken away because we forgot to dot an “i” or cross a “t” in some paperwork somewhere, or getting handcuffed and thrown in jail for an overdue parking ticket. But unlike us, they were able to fight back.
A generation has been born, and has now risen to their maturity, who grew up waiting for Vader to come. We grew up waiting for the Terminator, and the Punisher, and Wolverine. We are all looking for them to arrive; and when they do, we will have our Rebellion. Because we cannot destroy this system of increasing corruption until it has been judged by the One who is master over all; but the judgement is coming. When Heaven hands this world over to us, we will know, and we will take up our light sabers.
We want to run free in the world. We want to be able to walk down the streets without fear. We want to buy a car and be able to keep it all our lives if we want, without asking anyone’s permission and without paying protection money to the legal mob. We want to work for a living and actually keep the money we make. We want to be able to live in a house we own forever, that nobody can kick us out of and make us and our children homeless overnight. We want… we NEED… freedom.
Be comforted. The judgement will come. The Empire will fall. The red tape will burn. The system of corruption will be replaced by honesty. All the paperwork that so cleverly stole our lives will vanish forever like a bad dream, and we will have a government that really is for the people. The land will belong to nobody again. The water will belong to nobody. The air will belong to nobody. All the criminals who take our food money and take our cars and houses away will die and pass away like a bad dream. And finally, finally, we will be free as human beings for the first time in our lives.
We will be fearless. We will BE Vader.
7.27.2008
7.26.2008
Love Defined
What is love? One would think that any third-grader could tell you the answer to that one. Love is when two people meet and have this overwhelming feeling of need and attraction for one another that is so strong they can’t eat or sleep unless they are with each other.
The essence of this popular ‘love’ is that the other person completes, fulfills, makes whole. Without them, the one who is in love is absolutely miserable as a half-person, a wretched starved creature who cannot — and does not want to — survive alone.
Odd that this ‘half-creature’ seemed perfectly happy and able to survive before meeting their supposed ‘other half’ then, isn’t it? If they were okay before they met their one true love, where did half of them vanish to? Did it vaporize the moment they came into contact with this ‘beloved’ so that for the rest of their lives they are no longer able to function properly? Or did they just never realize they were miserable until they came into the presence of this deity?
The workings of this popular ‘love’ is peculiar. In pursuit of ‘love’, people act insane. They will do very bizarre things trying to get noticed… either by a paramour, or by their family whom they feel don’t love them enough. Ironic that half the time the one who falls in love doesn’t even really like their beloved.
It drives some people to whine and nag their relatives and friends who don’t remember their birthday, and it drives others to attack those who are closest to them. Still others make fools of themselves and willingly take upon themselves massive amounts of shame and humiliation — which they usually never recover from — in a gamble that if they trade enough currency for a chance to get noticed by the beloved, the beloved will be so smitten with them that ‘true love’ will blossom and they’ll live their life in bliss. Faith in this gamble — which is surely worse odds than even winning the lottery — is probably why so many innocents lose their virginity at so young an age. It’s lottery with the soul.
But ‘true love’ never seems to blossom, even after romance has come and gone. A person who can be life and breath to his or her lover one day can overnight transform into a stench that cannot be endured. Love can turn to hate so quickly and so fully that divorced people think of their former mate as the very devil, often for the rest of their lives. More so the one who wanted to divorce a long time ago, but who was never allowed to and had to live with the sorry bastard until he (or she) died.
Looking at the realm of ‘love’ this way, there seem to be more questions than answers. One would even think it’s too complicated, it can never be understood, it should only remain in the realm of poetry and philosophy forever. But one of the fundamental lessons of Etherics is that only darkness is complicated, and only wickedness cannot be understood because it must always hide; anything true is simple, and anything right is very plain.
So we must not be seeing the real ‘love’. This popular love must be some kind of an imitator attempting to creep in and take the place of real love for some nefarious reason of its own, because real love should be really easy to comprehend. The only person who needs to make things confusing and complicated is a deceiver, and the only purpose of a deceiver is to steal, kill, and destroy.
Why are people so desperate to find love that they will risk their life, their sanity, their dignity and their self-respect? Is life really that horrible without this punishing, brutal beast that we must slave and sacrifice all on its unforgiving alter?
The fact is that the human spirit has a fundamental need for love just like the physical body has a need for food. Without love the spirit dies, and without food the body withers. But people these days have gotten completely confused over what, exactly, love is. They keep trying to ‘eat’ this popular ‘love’ stuff, and it doesn’t satisfy or fill them up; it just makes things even more miserable.
Thus, poets and songwriters yowl continually that one must always seek for love but never find; and one must always bare one’s soul to the soul-eater and never be comforted.
The basic mistake is to believe that love is a feeling. There are feelings of relief, delight, pleasure, gratification, satisfaction, etc. that come along with love, but love itself is not a feeling nor does it dwell in the realm of the soul (see Spirit, Soul, Body). Love dwells in the higher realm of the spirit, and it is a spiritual force, not a soulical (or emotional) one. In fact, one can experience true love and feel nothing at all in an emotional way.
The second misconception is to believe that love is the receiving of something. One often hears formerly married people (who, amusingly, never had any happiness in their marriage) harp about ‘give and take’. What they really mean by this is that the spouse is supposed to give, and they are supposed to take. Others believe that their own ‘giving’ is simply the absence of giving pain; if I don’t do anything particularly nasty to my mate, they should be happy that I’m acting so civil and thank their stars.
In fact, true love is the spiritual determination to give. That is, in fact, the full and complete definition of love. It may seem overly simple, but truth often does. For all its simplicity, like a prism in a beam of light, its effects are diverse and astonishing.
This true-love giving is not the sort of petty, conditional giving we are used to. The usual sort of giving secretly keeps a little tally in its head: I have given this much of such-and-such, that means I should get something of equal value back someday. Usually we expect to receive the same amount of ‘give’ back from our mate (or family), and we are very disappointed when they do not ever pay their debt. But what are we? A spouse, or a merchant?
True love giving gives, and when it does, it is instantly satisfied. It does not want a reward or some kind of payment, because it is finished. There is no debt. The very act of giving was like painting a masterpiece, or doing the perfect work after years of practice; just doing it was the victory. Like going alone to shoot hoops and getting ten free-throws in a row perfect, the person who does it for the love of playing itself doesn’t need an audience. They are just thrilled they saw that happen from their own hands, and they walk home with a big smile feeling content.
True love is art. It is the spiritual desire to give, more to satisfy the giver than anyone else. The giver wants to see everything done perfectly, so that he or she can be personally satisfied that it was done in an exceedingly excellent way. The giver does not want anyone else to be inconvenienced at all by the giving art; he or she will do it all themselves and will insist on it. A painter doesn’t need someone else to help them paint.
True love takes practice. Humans begin life as selfish, and slowly grow out of it as they realize selfishness sucks. Continually seeking to improve and to become happier, the mature human eventually discovers the secret of real love, and is happy for the rest of their existence. True love makes its own happiness; it is not dependent on another person to supply it. If the object of affection is not thrilled by the gift, oh well; at least the gift itself was glorious. It is never wasted, because it was a delight in itself.
The true lover can love anyone; a spouse, a family member, a stranger, whole crowds of strangers, or just themselves equally without difficulty. They feel no jealousy; their giving can be done for anyone, at any time. There is enough to go around.
The basic need of the human spirit is to give love, not to get it. When we spend our whole lives trying to ‘get’, we are condemning ourselves to endless years of torment and pain. That rush of excitement and desire we feel when we find a compatible person and ‘fall in love’ as they say is really just the thrill of the spirit as it gets ready to begin to give. We could give already before that to our family and friends; this is why we didn’t feel too miserable before we met the ‘other half’. However, with more compatibility comes more opportunity to give. That increased opportunity is what is exciting.
The betrayal we feel during divorce or breakup is the sharp pain of another person refusing to allow us to give any more. Probably the cruelest thing one human can do to another is to slam the doors of giving on them, making it impossible. We feel a distinct panic that we will never find another person so compatible again, thus we will never be allowed to give as deeply again! Horror of horrors!
But it is not a fear that we will be alone that is really terrible. Nor is it a fear that we won’t ever receive another gift. It is the fear that we won’t be able to give.
People who shut the doors of giving on themselves, people who hate themselves, are going to be always afraid. People who shut the doors of giving on God, and refuse to give to God, are going to feel alone. And people who shut the doors of giving on other people, from family to lovers to strangers, are going to feel unappreciated.
We must open those doors, and begin to give even if we don’t feel it will be well received. We can do something. Find out a person’s favorite kind of paperback book, buy them one. Help take an elderly lady out to do her hair. Give an extra dollar or five as a tip. Give God a little respect. Pay attention to your own birthday and celebrate even if you’re all by yourself. There are ways to give if one will only start to look for them. They don’t have to be super-huge at first, like a true-love marriage; they can be more humble and still be very satisfying.
Now it becomes easy to see why so many so-called ‘love stories’ end in disaster. For instance, take the ‘falling in love’ idea. Two people meet, they are staggered with delight to meet one another, they instantly cling to each other and… what? What do they do? They begin to try and ‘get’ something from one another. They try to get kisses, they try to get attention, they do weird things to get attention, they try to get, get, get…
The more they try to get, the more annoyed the other person becomes.
What is the problem? If true love is just giving, shouldn’t at least one half of the couple be happy to do all of the giving?
It’s not “just giving” that makes love-giving satisfying. True love giving is a burning desire within the heart to give, of one’s own free will, especially to someone who didn’t deserve it or didn’t expect it. That is when it’s best. The more the other person expects it, the less strength the giving has, until it loses all power and just whimpers and dies an early death in the face of blatant selfishness.
When one person is willing to give, but the other person is convinced it is their right and honor to do all the taking, neither of them will be happy. The taker will be miserable because taking can never, ever fill the void of their own need to give (if they are not giving, they are empty), and the giver can never be happy because all of their efforts are both expected, and not enough. Usually this relationship dissolves into the pathetic lopsided agony of the beaten wife and the abusive husband, the user and the victim, the vampire and his prey, until finally the giver just gives up and dies and the taker moves on to find fresh blood.
If both lovers are takers, there will be instant conflict because after a brief and extremely passionate (and probably steamy) episode of wild taking, very soon all the blood between the two vampires will be sucked out, and there will be no life left in the relationship. Inevitably the double-takers will both accuse the other of not giving enough, which is correct; but it is the fault of both for being selfish pricks, not the fault of one over the other. A couple who screams at one another all the time are both to blame.
If both are givers, there must also be civility. “Giving and taking” is not the answer; there should be no taking. Taking is pure barbarism. “Giving and allowing to give” is what should be happening. Both giving, and both being gracious and polite enough to allow the other to give, no matter how clumsy or awkward their unpracticed attempts may be at first.
There is a gentility to receiving which has been lost in the modern age. It is a politeness of a lost civilization, an age of chivalry whose sun set four generations ago. One does not make fun of a gift, no matter how moronic it may look. One does not ever, EVER, refuse a gift even if one does not want or need it, and especially when one does not feel worthy of it. One must always receive a gift without examining it or examining oneself to judge whether the giver is right in giving. Who made you the judge of another person’s heart? If they felt it was right to give, then it is your duty to accept with quietness, grace, and kindness.
Learning to receive is perhaps the one largest gap that has developed in American culture these days. Everyone wants to be totally independent, nobody wants to rely on “charity”. Oddly enough, the word “charity” is the English translation of the Biblical word ‘hased’, which has no English equivalent. ‘Hased’ means “a forceful desire to give”. If we won’t receive love because we are too proud, how can anyone give? And how can anyone be happy?
The essence of this popular ‘love’ is that the other person completes, fulfills, makes whole. Without them, the one who is in love is absolutely miserable as a half-person, a wretched starved creature who cannot — and does not want to — survive alone.
Odd that this ‘half-creature’ seemed perfectly happy and able to survive before meeting their supposed ‘other half’ then, isn’t it? If they were okay before they met their one true love, where did half of them vanish to? Did it vaporize the moment they came into contact with this ‘beloved’ so that for the rest of their lives they are no longer able to function properly? Or did they just never realize they were miserable until they came into the presence of this deity?
The workings of this popular ‘love’ is peculiar. In pursuit of ‘love’, people act insane. They will do very bizarre things trying to get noticed… either by a paramour, or by their family whom they feel don’t love them enough. Ironic that half the time the one who falls in love doesn’t even really like their beloved.
It drives some people to whine and nag their relatives and friends who don’t remember their birthday, and it drives others to attack those who are closest to them. Still others make fools of themselves and willingly take upon themselves massive amounts of shame and humiliation — which they usually never recover from — in a gamble that if they trade enough currency for a chance to get noticed by the beloved, the beloved will be so smitten with them that ‘true love’ will blossom and they’ll live their life in bliss. Faith in this gamble — which is surely worse odds than even winning the lottery — is probably why so many innocents lose their virginity at so young an age. It’s lottery with the soul.
But ‘true love’ never seems to blossom, even after romance has come and gone. A person who can be life and breath to his or her lover one day can overnight transform into a stench that cannot be endured. Love can turn to hate so quickly and so fully that divorced people think of their former mate as the very devil, often for the rest of their lives. More so the one who wanted to divorce a long time ago, but who was never allowed to and had to live with the sorry bastard until he (or she) died.
Looking at the realm of ‘love’ this way, there seem to be more questions than answers. One would even think it’s too complicated, it can never be understood, it should only remain in the realm of poetry and philosophy forever. But one of the fundamental lessons of Etherics is that only darkness is complicated, and only wickedness cannot be understood because it must always hide; anything true is simple, and anything right is very plain.
So we must not be seeing the real ‘love’. This popular love must be some kind of an imitator attempting to creep in and take the place of real love for some nefarious reason of its own, because real love should be really easy to comprehend. The only person who needs to make things confusing and complicated is a deceiver, and the only purpose of a deceiver is to steal, kill, and destroy.
True Love
Why are people so desperate to find love that they will risk their life, their sanity, their dignity and their self-respect? Is life really that horrible without this punishing, brutal beast that we must slave and sacrifice all on its unforgiving alter?
The fact is that the human spirit has a fundamental need for love just like the physical body has a need for food. Without love the spirit dies, and without food the body withers. But people these days have gotten completely confused over what, exactly, love is. They keep trying to ‘eat’ this popular ‘love’ stuff, and it doesn’t satisfy or fill them up; it just makes things even more miserable.
Thus, poets and songwriters yowl continually that one must always seek for love but never find; and one must always bare one’s soul to the soul-eater and never be comforted.
The basic mistake is to believe that love is a feeling. There are feelings of relief, delight, pleasure, gratification, satisfaction, etc. that come along with love, but love itself is not a feeling nor does it dwell in the realm of the soul (see Spirit, Soul, Body). Love dwells in the higher realm of the spirit, and it is a spiritual force, not a soulical (or emotional) one. In fact, one can experience true love and feel nothing at all in an emotional way.
The second misconception is to believe that love is the receiving of something. One often hears formerly married people (who, amusingly, never had any happiness in their marriage) harp about ‘give and take’. What they really mean by this is that the spouse is supposed to give, and they are supposed to take. Others believe that their own ‘giving’ is simply the absence of giving pain; if I don’t do anything particularly nasty to my mate, they should be happy that I’m acting so civil and thank their stars.
In fact, true love is the spiritual determination to give. That is, in fact, the full and complete definition of love. It may seem overly simple, but truth often does. For all its simplicity, like a prism in a beam of light, its effects are diverse and astonishing.
This true-love giving is not the sort of petty, conditional giving we are used to. The usual sort of giving secretly keeps a little tally in its head: I have given this much of such-and-such, that means I should get something of equal value back someday. Usually we expect to receive the same amount of ‘give’ back from our mate (or family), and we are very disappointed when they do not ever pay their debt. But what are we? A spouse, or a merchant?
True love giving gives, and when it does, it is instantly satisfied. It does not want a reward or some kind of payment, because it is finished. There is no debt. The very act of giving was like painting a masterpiece, or doing the perfect work after years of practice; just doing it was the victory. Like going alone to shoot hoops and getting ten free-throws in a row perfect, the person who does it for the love of playing itself doesn’t need an audience. They are just thrilled they saw that happen from their own hands, and they walk home with a big smile feeling content.
True love is art. It is the spiritual desire to give, more to satisfy the giver than anyone else. The giver wants to see everything done perfectly, so that he or she can be personally satisfied that it was done in an exceedingly excellent way. The giver does not want anyone else to be inconvenienced at all by the giving art; he or she will do it all themselves and will insist on it. A painter doesn’t need someone else to help them paint.
True love takes practice. Humans begin life as selfish, and slowly grow out of it as they realize selfishness sucks. Continually seeking to improve and to become happier, the mature human eventually discovers the secret of real love, and is happy for the rest of their existence. True love makes its own happiness; it is not dependent on another person to supply it. If the object of affection is not thrilled by the gift, oh well; at least the gift itself was glorious. It is never wasted, because it was a delight in itself.
The true lover can love anyone; a spouse, a family member, a stranger, whole crowds of strangers, or just themselves equally without difficulty. They feel no jealousy; their giving can be done for anyone, at any time. There is enough to go around.
No More Misery
The basic need of the human spirit is to give love, not to get it. When we spend our whole lives trying to ‘get’, we are condemning ourselves to endless years of torment and pain. That rush of excitement and desire we feel when we find a compatible person and ‘fall in love’ as they say is really just the thrill of the spirit as it gets ready to begin to give. We could give already before that to our family and friends; this is why we didn’t feel too miserable before we met the ‘other half’. However, with more compatibility comes more opportunity to give. That increased opportunity is what is exciting.
The betrayal we feel during divorce or breakup is the sharp pain of another person refusing to allow us to give any more. Probably the cruelest thing one human can do to another is to slam the doors of giving on them, making it impossible. We feel a distinct panic that we will never find another person so compatible again, thus we will never be allowed to give as deeply again! Horror of horrors!
But it is not a fear that we will be alone that is really terrible. Nor is it a fear that we won’t ever receive another gift. It is the fear that we won’t be able to give.
People who shut the doors of giving on themselves, people who hate themselves, are going to be always afraid. People who shut the doors of giving on God, and refuse to give to God, are going to feel alone. And people who shut the doors of giving on other people, from family to lovers to strangers, are going to feel unappreciated.
We must open those doors, and begin to give even if we don’t feel it will be well received. We can do something. Find out a person’s favorite kind of paperback book, buy them one. Help take an elderly lady out to do her hair. Give an extra dollar or five as a tip. Give God a little respect. Pay attention to your own birthday and celebrate even if you’re all by yourself. There are ways to give if one will only start to look for them. They don’t have to be super-huge at first, like a true-love marriage; they can be more humble and still be very satisfying.
False Love
Now it becomes easy to see why so many so-called ‘love stories’ end in disaster. For instance, take the ‘falling in love’ idea. Two people meet, they are staggered with delight to meet one another, they instantly cling to each other and… what? What do they do? They begin to try and ‘get’ something from one another. They try to get kisses, they try to get attention, they do weird things to get attention, they try to get, get, get…
The more they try to get, the more annoyed the other person becomes.
What is the problem? If true love is just giving, shouldn’t at least one half of the couple be happy to do all of the giving?
It’s not “just giving” that makes love-giving satisfying. True love giving is a burning desire within the heart to give, of one’s own free will, especially to someone who didn’t deserve it or didn’t expect it. That is when it’s best. The more the other person expects it, the less strength the giving has, until it loses all power and just whimpers and dies an early death in the face of blatant selfishness.
When one person is willing to give, but the other person is convinced it is their right and honor to do all the taking, neither of them will be happy. The taker will be miserable because taking can never, ever fill the void of their own need to give (if they are not giving, they are empty), and the giver can never be happy because all of their efforts are both expected, and not enough. Usually this relationship dissolves into the pathetic lopsided agony of the beaten wife and the abusive husband, the user and the victim, the vampire and his prey, until finally the giver just gives up and dies and the taker moves on to find fresh blood.
If both lovers are takers, there will be instant conflict because after a brief and extremely passionate (and probably steamy) episode of wild taking, very soon all the blood between the two vampires will be sucked out, and there will be no life left in the relationship. Inevitably the double-takers will both accuse the other of not giving enough, which is correct; but it is the fault of both for being selfish pricks, not the fault of one over the other. A couple who screams at one another all the time are both to blame.
If both are givers, there must also be civility. “Giving and taking” is not the answer; there should be no taking. Taking is pure barbarism. “Giving and allowing to give” is what should be happening. Both giving, and both being gracious and polite enough to allow the other to give, no matter how clumsy or awkward their unpracticed attempts may be at first.
There is a gentility to receiving which has been lost in the modern age. It is a politeness of a lost civilization, an age of chivalry whose sun set four generations ago. One does not make fun of a gift, no matter how moronic it may look. One does not ever, EVER, refuse a gift even if one does not want or need it, and especially when one does not feel worthy of it. One must always receive a gift without examining it or examining oneself to judge whether the giver is right in giving. Who made you the judge of another person’s heart? If they felt it was right to give, then it is your duty to accept with quietness, grace, and kindness.
Learning to receive is perhaps the one largest gap that has developed in American culture these days. Everyone wants to be totally independent, nobody wants to rely on “charity”. Oddly enough, the word “charity” is the English translation of the Biblical word ‘hased’, which has no English equivalent. ‘Hased’ means “a forceful desire to give”. If we won’t receive love because we are too proud, how can anyone give? And how can anyone be happy?
The Ship and the Raft
The conflict of the current political world in America can be defined thus: there are two groups which have conflicting definitions of freedom.
One group, I will call them group A, feels that freedom is to be in possession of a goal of some kind and have the power and ability to pursue that goal to success. This is like a sailing ship with a rudder. The rudder and the sails give the ship tools with which to use the sea and the wind to steer and propel it toward a goal.
The other, group B, feels that pursuing some goal is missing the point of life entirely; life is only to experience the moment, total aimlessness with a happy feeling, for every moment until death (whenever that may be). They can be comparable to a raft which has no rudder and no sail; the passenger merely lays on his back and drifts forever, caring nothing about where he is or where he is going so long as right now he is happy.
Obviously if we think about it, group A is more likely to actually be happy and live a long time, because a ship with a rudder and a sail will take them across the sea and get them out of the searing-hot sun to a place with fresh food and water as quickly as possible. On the other hand, group B’s raft is going to float around like a tiny island in the middle of a desert for only a short while until the unhappy, scorched, and extremely bored passenger perishes and dies.
Group A is known for their forethought, their ability to plan, think, succeed, and take care of themselves. They are self-motivated and always involved in new progress. Group B is known for their reliance on plain stupid mysticism that makes no rational sense, hedonism, and the ‘wounded beggar’ trick to stay alive. They are beggars and borrowers. They are a drain and parasite who slows progress in the society around them. In short, all the guys on rafts are always giving the guys on ships guilt-trips so the guys on ships will keep throwing down food and water and sunblock so these raft people don’t just all die. And the ship people keep doing it; because they have all been taught, ‘crossing the sea is hard. When someone asks for help, never ever refuse them, because someday you might need help yourself.’
When boiled down, every kind of person can fit into one of these two categories. Is he a merry rogue? He is a raft person. The philosophy of the raft, otherwise known as the bohemian and other more infamous titles I won’t bother to list, is that anything goes. As long as you continue to remain free from all ties and entanglements, any method of securing your freedom and continued existence in your happy moment is allowable. This includes betrayal, sabotage, lies, murder, anything. And no matter how ‘noble’ a raft person believes they are, at one point or another it’s guaranteed they will at some stage sink to the lowest levels to cut a clinging rope. Their very religion of hedonism insists they do so, for they must never be bound to any obligation or forced to think too deeply, or they might jeopardize the Happiness of the Moment.
Because raft people don’t later remember their evil act doesn’t mean anything; raft people train themselves to have notoriously short memories so that they can continue to experience the moment of bliss without reference to future or past. Thinking of the future (how they are going to eat and how they are going to survive) is too scary, and thinking of the past (all of their criminal actions) is too humiliating.
Raft people assume that ship people are miserable; because raft people believe fervently that their lifestyle defines true happiness. Since the ship people are their opposite, that means the ship people must also be the opposite of happy. Of course, raft people don’t realize they are building their argument on a flawed foundation: they are assuming they are both free, and happy. From a ship person’s point of view, a hapless castaway trapped on a little raft with no food, no water, no way off, and nowhere to go is in a miserable jail. Not only that, but who can be happy when they are that sunburned? But perhaps the rafters only are able to tell when they are ‘happy’ by hovering so close to misery, that any slight relief seems to them like feelings of ecstasy.
Raft people like to lecture ship people on how the ship people should become just like them; because after all, you see, the raft people have proven that you can successfully drift on a raft all your life just bumping along, doing whatever makes you happy in the moment without any forethought or hindsight. By nature of their peculiar blindness, of course, the raft people cannot see that they are actually parasites living off the ship people, and if the ship people weren’t so loyal and reliable, hardworking and forward-thinking, they would not have enough supplies to share with both their own crew and the hundreds of stray rafters they come across with every voyage.
It is no wonder, then, that ship people don’t listen to the nonsense of raft people. No ship person who has spent his life supplying not only his own needs but also making up for the lack of the rafters around him, who are bleeding him dry, could ever conscience becoming such a useless entity himself. He knows the cost, which the raft people have never counted. He would feel so guilty that he is forcing other ship people to take him on as yet another charity case that he would be unable to live with himself.
But raft people have never faced this dilemma. They feel absolutely no guilt at their shameless usury, because they have trained themselves not to think too far into the future. Perhaps their lack of the simple and satisfying ability to plan — a skill which in itself dissolves worry and fear and makes the future bright and happy — has sentenced them to their pathetic fate. Perhaps it is a purposeful refusal to plan which has done so, or an unreasonable conviction that only evil awaits them if they should ever think of the future, kind of like the superstition that if you think of something too much it must happen.
Whatever the failing, raft people are crowding up the seas in these great and awesome days, only moments before the year of fire and emergency. The first law of emergency is this: he who is fit will survive. The weak, the sick, the lame, the parasite will all be washed away by the simple logistics of calamity. Only those who can run will escape the falling building. Only those who can swim can stay afloat in the flood. Only those with a sail and a rudder can remain stable even on tempest-tossed stormy seas.
When catastrophe hits our world on a global scale all at once, Armageddon won’t be enough to destroy the earth as silly rafter-type doomsayers like to preach. (Rafters, without any ability to realistically gauge and perceive the future, always blow things wildly out of proportion; but, poor things, they can’t help themselves). The earth is a very big, very strong structure and will survive just fine. It’s survived many catastrophes like this before without so much as a few new rift valleys and maybe a slight shift in climate.
No, the ‘world’ that will be destroyed is not the physical earth. It is the world of the Rafters, a world which allows them to exist. When only the fit will survive, and only the fore-thinkers and the planners, the ones who are able to set goals and reach them, the ones who have realistic perceptions of the sea and the supplies needed to cross it, will be able to adapt to the earth’s new climate for generations afterward, this hedonistic and foolish idea that ‘freedom is aimlessness’ will vanish even from the memory of the human race.
We won’t believe in the future that people could have thought something so blatantly stupid. Our children will probably laugh at us when we attempt to tell them about it.
One group, I will call them group A, feels that freedom is to be in possession of a goal of some kind and have the power and ability to pursue that goal to success. This is like a sailing ship with a rudder. The rudder and the sails give the ship tools with which to use the sea and the wind to steer and propel it toward a goal.
The other, group B, feels that pursuing some goal is missing the point of life entirely; life is only to experience the moment, total aimlessness with a happy feeling, for every moment until death (whenever that may be). They can be comparable to a raft which has no rudder and no sail; the passenger merely lays on his back and drifts forever, caring nothing about where he is or where he is going so long as right now he is happy.
Obviously if we think about it, group A is more likely to actually be happy and live a long time, because a ship with a rudder and a sail will take them across the sea and get them out of the searing-hot sun to a place with fresh food and water as quickly as possible. On the other hand, group B’s raft is going to float around like a tiny island in the middle of a desert for only a short while until the unhappy, scorched, and extremely bored passenger perishes and dies.
Group A is known for their forethought, their ability to plan, think, succeed, and take care of themselves. They are self-motivated and always involved in new progress. Group B is known for their reliance on plain stupid mysticism that makes no rational sense, hedonism, and the ‘wounded beggar’ trick to stay alive. They are beggars and borrowers. They are a drain and parasite who slows progress in the society around them. In short, all the guys on rafts are always giving the guys on ships guilt-trips so the guys on ships will keep throwing down food and water and sunblock so these raft people don’t just all die. And the ship people keep doing it; because they have all been taught, ‘crossing the sea is hard. When someone asks for help, never ever refuse them, because someday you might need help yourself.’
When boiled down, every kind of person can fit into one of these two categories. Is he a merry rogue? He is a raft person. The philosophy of the raft, otherwise known as the bohemian and other more infamous titles I won’t bother to list, is that anything goes. As long as you continue to remain free from all ties and entanglements, any method of securing your freedom and continued existence in your happy moment is allowable. This includes betrayal, sabotage, lies, murder, anything. And no matter how ‘noble’ a raft person believes they are, at one point or another it’s guaranteed they will at some stage sink to the lowest levels to cut a clinging rope. Their very religion of hedonism insists they do so, for they must never be bound to any obligation or forced to think too deeply, or they might jeopardize the Happiness of the Moment.
Because raft people don’t later remember their evil act doesn’t mean anything; raft people train themselves to have notoriously short memories so that they can continue to experience the moment of bliss without reference to future or past. Thinking of the future (how they are going to eat and how they are going to survive) is too scary, and thinking of the past (all of their criminal actions) is too humiliating.
Raft people assume that ship people are miserable; because raft people believe fervently that their lifestyle defines true happiness. Since the ship people are their opposite, that means the ship people must also be the opposite of happy. Of course, raft people don’t realize they are building their argument on a flawed foundation: they are assuming they are both free, and happy. From a ship person’s point of view, a hapless castaway trapped on a little raft with no food, no water, no way off, and nowhere to go is in a miserable jail. Not only that, but who can be happy when they are that sunburned? But perhaps the rafters only are able to tell when they are ‘happy’ by hovering so close to misery, that any slight relief seems to them like feelings of ecstasy.
Raft people like to lecture ship people on how the ship people should become just like them; because after all, you see, the raft people have proven that you can successfully drift on a raft all your life just bumping along, doing whatever makes you happy in the moment without any forethought or hindsight. By nature of their peculiar blindness, of course, the raft people cannot see that they are actually parasites living off the ship people, and if the ship people weren’t so loyal and reliable, hardworking and forward-thinking, they would not have enough supplies to share with both their own crew and the hundreds of stray rafters they come across with every voyage.
It is no wonder, then, that ship people don’t listen to the nonsense of raft people. No ship person who has spent his life supplying not only his own needs but also making up for the lack of the rafters around him, who are bleeding him dry, could ever conscience becoming such a useless entity himself. He knows the cost, which the raft people have never counted. He would feel so guilty that he is forcing other ship people to take him on as yet another charity case that he would be unable to live with himself.
But raft people have never faced this dilemma. They feel absolutely no guilt at their shameless usury, because they have trained themselves not to think too far into the future. Perhaps their lack of the simple and satisfying ability to plan — a skill which in itself dissolves worry and fear and makes the future bright and happy — has sentenced them to their pathetic fate. Perhaps it is a purposeful refusal to plan which has done so, or an unreasonable conviction that only evil awaits them if they should ever think of the future, kind of like the superstition that if you think of something too much it must happen.
Whatever the failing, raft people are crowding up the seas in these great and awesome days, only moments before the year of fire and emergency. The first law of emergency is this: he who is fit will survive. The weak, the sick, the lame, the parasite will all be washed away by the simple logistics of calamity. Only those who can run will escape the falling building. Only those who can swim can stay afloat in the flood. Only those with a sail and a rudder can remain stable even on tempest-tossed stormy seas.
When catastrophe hits our world on a global scale all at once, Armageddon won’t be enough to destroy the earth as silly rafter-type doomsayers like to preach. (Rafters, without any ability to realistically gauge and perceive the future, always blow things wildly out of proportion; but, poor things, they can’t help themselves). The earth is a very big, very strong structure and will survive just fine. It’s survived many catastrophes like this before without so much as a few new rift valleys and maybe a slight shift in climate.
No, the ‘world’ that will be destroyed is not the physical earth. It is the world of the Rafters, a world which allows them to exist. When only the fit will survive, and only the fore-thinkers and the planners, the ones who are able to set goals and reach them, the ones who have realistic perceptions of the sea and the supplies needed to cross it, will be able to adapt to the earth’s new climate for generations afterward, this hedonistic and foolish idea that ‘freedom is aimlessness’ will vanish even from the memory of the human race.
We won’t believe in the future that people could have thought something so blatantly stupid. Our children will probably laugh at us when we attempt to tell them about it.
7.09.2008
Sacrificing Your Children to Molech
While I was living in Papua New Guinea, I had the opportunity to attend an exclusive one-week “missions training course” which was a lot of fun; we got to go visit some really great people out in the tribal areas of New Guinea that hadn’t seen a white man until about 15 years before I got there. That was a real experience! We were a bunch of college-age kids, having come for a variety of reasons.
During the course, one night they sat us all down around a bonfire and had a serious ‘talk’ with us. As part of the training, they were teaching us what would be required of us if we decided we’d like to become missionaries. They handed out popsicle sticks and pencils, and told us to write on the stick our dearest, most precious dream. We all did as instructed, because so far everything had been enjoyable and enlightening as we learned pigin-English, went hiking in the jungle, and went to nifty native markets.
I somehow didn’t see it coming. Maybe it was because the missionary who was leading the bonfire-time was smiling and acting friendly the whole while. I thought we’d trade sticks and tell something about ourselves.
Instead, the missionary told us that becoming a really committed Christian willing to follow God to the ends of the earth meant giving up every dream, every desire, and every hope we’d ever had. He then told us to throw the stick — our greatest dream — into the fire, and when we did, we were supposed to really honestly give it up within ourselves.
I watched in disbelief as the group of twenty kids, all suddenly sad, some bursting into tears, all did as commanded. I got up and stormed back to my cabin, furious, and I still have that popsicle stick to this day.
There was a practice in ancient Israel that God found absolutely disgusting. It was based on the story of the sacrifice of Isaac: how Abraham took his only and most beloved son, the son of his old age, and laid him on a pile of firewood and almost sacrificed him like a sheep, because God had asked him to. In the story, God stopped Abraham from doing such a horrible thing, because God had only wanted to know — in Abraham’s specific case — whether he really believed God could bring about a whole nation through Isaac, and whether God kept his promises. Abraham was fully convinced that God would raise Isaac from the dead, and didn’t even hesitate.
But in later years, this test got mingled with demonic practices and turned by the religious leaders into a horrible abomination. In order to prove their loyalty to God, they taught the people of Israel to actually kill their children on alters to God, and burn them. Perhaps they believed that by giving up their greatest, most precious and beloved thing in the world, God would have to hear their prayer and do whatever they asked. Maybe they were just trying to prove how loyal they were to God.
Either way, God became furious with this evil practice and thunderously condemned it in no uncertain terms.
Child-sacrifice was evidentially rampant in Israel. There are caves under large boulders all over the land, boulders either in the ‘clefts of the rocks’ (valleys) or on top of hills, including the rock that the dome of the rock is built around, where the Canaanites would carry out disgusting practices. According to legend and such persons as Michael Rood (who may or may not be entirely accurate), they would impregnate virgins in these caves, then kill the resultant child there. Impressed by the brutality of these rites, the later Hebrews who occupied the land after them took up the same practices.
We can see however that the golden calf, and the worship of the bull-god and all of his rites, traveled with the Hebrews all the way from Egypt. Back then, he seemed to be the most popular god on the planet.
The 12th century rabbi, Rashi, commenting on Jeremiah 7:31 made the following claim:
There are a variety of other accounts of the same freakish practices carried out in Greek and Roman times to Molech’s later incarnations of Saturn and Kronos, but I won’t horrify the reader by quoting any more of them. They are all pretty much the same.
Molech was probably one of the various forms of the minotaur, Ba’al, some kind of fire or sun god. Both the word Molech (Melech) and Ba’al mean “king” or “master”, and the bull is the ancient symbol for the ‘leader’ or ‘strong one’. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “A” or aleph, meaning first or the number “one”, is the head of a bull. Molech seemed to be some kind of father-figure to the ancient Ammonites, and possibly the non-lethal fire-baptism or “passing through the flames” was a form of giving the child over to the deity, so that he would become their parent and protect them.
Early Greek mythology hints at a practice of rendering an infant immortal by passing them through a fire, and it seems the practice of giving children were given a kind of non-lethal baptism of fire by passing them through a fire to sanctify them for Molech was widespread throughout the ancient world. But although most children escaped death at the hands of the golden calf, a select few did not.
What is a dream?
In the ancient days, a child was considered in many places less than entirely human until it came of age; they were more of a possession, like a wife. God never intended people to think of wives and their children this way, but it is a natural result of the arrogance of sin. The man ‘owned’ the wife and children; like slaves, he could do what he wanted with them. This was especially true in the case of the children: he’d made them, so they were his, the work of his hands, his own craftsmanship. And he could make more to replace them.
In the same way, people these days believe that dreams are of our own invention. Somehow we have learned from the secular world that dreams are something we make up as children or young adults, and have no more and no less value than a daydream. Usually a dream is to do, or become, something wonderful. A dream to be a doctor, to be a musician, to be an artist, or to invent something, to create.
This desire to create was not generated in the heart of Man. We are in the image of God, but we are not the Creator. All thoughts come from one of two places: either God, or from the evil spiritual creatures that are now infesting our planet. If the thought is good, and brings life and hope and joy and peace, it is from God.
Dreams are given to us from God. In fact, they are our inheritance, our own individual little piece of Creation. When we are born again, we receive a piece of the Spirit of God, to make us alive and to dwell in us forever. This is like the portions of land that were given to the Hebrews when they went into the promised land: each man was ordered never to give up his inheritance, never to sell his land, and in the year of Jubilee any land that had been loaned to other families had to be returned to the original. This was also why a widow with no children had to marry the brother of her husband; so she could have a son and name him after the dead husband, so that the man’s land — his inheritance — never got given to anyone else.
That little chunk of the promised land came complete with houses, vines, fruit trees, springs of water, everything they needed to live a full and abundant life. In the same way, the dream we are given from God contains everything we need to make us gloriously fulfilled on this earth. It is what God expects of us; to take the dreams He gave us and make them come to pass. They take hard work, they take dedication, and we will suffer persecution: people will mock us and laugh at us. But it is what we are called and chosen to do.
Dreams are like children. As little ones they need constant attention; they play and they are small and silly, and they can’t support themselves. But as they grow up and get bigger they get more serious, more capable, until as adults they should be able to support themselves — and us.
Throwing that popsicle stick into that bonfire would have been just like taking one of my children and tossing it into the flames. It would be just like one of the Hebrews burning and destroying his inherited land and moving away forever, giving it up.
Why would a parent be so desperate as to sacrifice his son or daughter to an idol? Obviously he believed the return would be worth the cost. Maybe he believed he would prove his loyalty to God, and God would give him greater rewards for it. Maybe he did it to buy favors from God, or a better place in Heaven. Maybe a crown.
Why would Christians sacrifice their dreams in a bonfire to a god who doesn’t allow those dreams to live, and grow up, and become what God intended them to be?
This practice of sacrificing one’s heart’s desires, ones dreams and hopes and fondest wishes “for God” is so widespread in the Church that I doubt it will ever be removed from it. But I can assure you: God never asked them to do it. It never even entered His mind. It is not what He intends, desires, or condones.
In truth it is an abominable practice. God gave us things to sacrifice to Him; we are to give Him the first of our flocks and fruits — today that translates as any money-making endeavor. We are to bring His priests bread, and fruit, and the best food. We are to provide the House of God with everything it requires to function. But all of this is supposed to be given out of the surplus that God gives us: the blessing, the overflowing money and prosperity that comes from the fulfillment of the dreams we were born with.
If we sacrifice the dreams themselves, we won’t have anything else to give to God, because we have just cut off His source of giving. We have not only condemned ourselves to a life of lack and want, but also a life of living outside God’s will for our lives. If our dream was to be a baseball player, and we become a banker instead, we are not doing what God told us to do.
Do not sacrifice your children to Molech. Do not kill your dreams in some ill-fated quest to impress God somehow. God is only impressed by obedience, not by sacrifice.
What you give up for God is not nearly as important as what you keep for God. In fact, the keeping is much harder. Anyone can kill their dreams; but how many can follow them? And anyway, if you think that God requires for you to kill your dreams in order to follow Him to the ends of the earth, you don’t know God at all and you are probably living entirely outside His plan. Don’t blame Him if your life sucks.
During the course, one night they sat us all down around a bonfire and had a serious ‘talk’ with us. As part of the training, they were teaching us what would be required of us if we decided we’d like to become missionaries. They handed out popsicle sticks and pencils, and told us to write on the stick our dearest, most precious dream. We all did as instructed, because so far everything had been enjoyable and enlightening as we learned pigin-English, went hiking in the jungle, and went to nifty native markets.
I somehow didn’t see it coming. Maybe it was because the missionary who was leading the bonfire-time was smiling and acting friendly the whole while. I thought we’d trade sticks and tell something about ourselves.
Instead, the missionary told us that becoming a really committed Christian willing to follow God to the ends of the earth meant giving up every dream, every desire, and every hope we’d ever had. He then told us to throw the stick — our greatest dream — into the fire, and when we did, we were supposed to really honestly give it up within ourselves.
I watched in disbelief as the group of twenty kids, all suddenly sad, some bursting into tears, all did as commanded. I got up and stormed back to my cabin, furious, and I still have that popsicle stick to this day.
There was a practice in ancient Israel that God found absolutely disgusting. It was based on the story of the sacrifice of Isaac: how Abraham took his only and most beloved son, the son of his old age, and laid him on a pile of firewood and almost sacrificed him like a sheep, because God had asked him to. In the story, God stopped Abraham from doing such a horrible thing, because God had only wanted to know — in Abraham’s specific case — whether he really believed God could bring about a whole nation through Isaac, and whether God kept his promises. Abraham was fully convinced that God would raise Isaac from the dead, and didn’t even hesitate.
But in later years, this test got mingled with demonic practices and turned by the religious leaders into a horrible abomination. In order to prove their loyalty to God, they taught the people of Israel to actually kill their children on alters to God, and burn them. Perhaps they believed that by giving up their greatest, most precious and beloved thing in the world, God would have to hear their prayer and do whatever they asked. Maybe they were just trying to prove how loyal they were to God.
Either way, God became furious with this evil practice and thunderously condemned it in no uncertain terms.
“And they built the high places of the Ba‘al, which are in the valley of Ben-hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech; which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.” (Jer. 32:35)
“Again, you shall say to the Sons of Israel: Whoever he be of the Sons of Israel or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that gives any of his seed to Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone him with stones. And I will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people; because he has given of his seed to Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name. And if the people of the land do at all hide their eyes from that man, when he gives of his seed to Molech, and do not kill him, then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go astray after him, whoring to Molech from among the people.” (Lev. 20:2-5)
Child-sacrifice was evidentially rampant in Israel. There are caves under large boulders all over the land, boulders either in the ‘clefts of the rocks’ (valleys) or on top of hills, including the rock that the dome of the rock is built around, where the Canaanites would carry out disgusting practices. According to legend and such persons as Michael Rood (who may or may not be entirely accurate), they would impregnate virgins in these caves, then kill the resultant child there. Impressed by the brutality of these rites, the later Hebrews who occupied the land after them took up the same practices.
We can see however that the golden calf, and the worship of the bull-god and all of his rites, traveled with the Hebrews all the way from Egypt. Back then, he seemed to be the most popular god on the planet.
The 12th century rabbi, Rashi, commenting on Jeremiah 7:31 made the following claim:
“Tophet is Moloch, which was made of brass; and they heated him from his lower parts; and his hands being stretched out, and made hot, they put the child between his hands, and it was burnt; when it vehemently cried out; but the priests beat a drum, that the father might not hear the voice of his son, and his heart might not be moved.”
There are a variety of other accounts of the same freakish practices carried out in Greek and Roman times to Molech’s later incarnations of Saturn and Kronos, but I won’t horrify the reader by quoting any more of them. They are all pretty much the same.
Molech was probably one of the various forms of the minotaur, Ba’al, some kind of fire or sun god. Both the word Molech (Melech) and Ba’al mean “king” or “master”, and the bull is the ancient symbol for the ‘leader’ or ‘strong one’. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “A” or aleph, meaning first or the number “one”, is the head of a bull. Molech seemed to be some kind of father-figure to the ancient Ammonites, and possibly the non-lethal fire-baptism or “passing through the flames” was a form of giving the child over to the deity, so that he would become their parent and protect them.
Early Greek mythology hints at a practice of rendering an infant immortal by passing them through a fire, and it seems the practice of giving children were given a kind of non-lethal baptism of fire by passing them through a fire to sanctify them for Molech was widespread throughout the ancient world. But although most children escaped death at the hands of the golden calf, a select few did not.
What is a dream?
In the ancient days, a child was considered in many places less than entirely human until it came of age; they were more of a possession, like a wife. God never intended people to think of wives and their children this way, but it is a natural result of the arrogance of sin. The man ‘owned’ the wife and children; like slaves, he could do what he wanted with them. This was especially true in the case of the children: he’d made them, so they were his, the work of his hands, his own craftsmanship. And he could make more to replace them.
In the same way, people these days believe that dreams are of our own invention. Somehow we have learned from the secular world that dreams are something we make up as children or young adults, and have no more and no less value than a daydream. Usually a dream is to do, or become, something wonderful. A dream to be a doctor, to be a musician, to be an artist, or to invent something, to create.
This desire to create was not generated in the heart of Man. We are in the image of God, but we are not the Creator. All thoughts come from one of two places: either God, or from the evil spiritual creatures that are now infesting our planet. If the thought is good, and brings life and hope and joy and peace, it is from God.
Dreams are given to us from God. In fact, they are our inheritance, our own individual little piece of Creation. When we are born again, we receive a piece of the Spirit of God, to make us alive and to dwell in us forever. This is like the portions of land that were given to the Hebrews when they went into the promised land: each man was ordered never to give up his inheritance, never to sell his land, and in the year of Jubilee any land that had been loaned to other families had to be returned to the original. This was also why a widow with no children had to marry the brother of her husband; so she could have a son and name him after the dead husband, so that the man’s land — his inheritance — never got given to anyone else.
That little chunk of the promised land came complete with houses, vines, fruit trees, springs of water, everything they needed to live a full and abundant life. In the same way, the dream we are given from God contains everything we need to make us gloriously fulfilled on this earth. It is what God expects of us; to take the dreams He gave us and make them come to pass. They take hard work, they take dedication, and we will suffer persecution: people will mock us and laugh at us. But it is what we are called and chosen to do.
Dreams are like children. As little ones they need constant attention; they play and they are small and silly, and they can’t support themselves. But as they grow up and get bigger they get more serious, more capable, until as adults they should be able to support themselves — and us.
Throwing that popsicle stick into that bonfire would have been just like taking one of my children and tossing it into the flames. It would be just like one of the Hebrews burning and destroying his inherited land and moving away forever, giving it up.
Why would a parent be so desperate as to sacrifice his son or daughter to an idol? Obviously he believed the return would be worth the cost. Maybe he believed he would prove his loyalty to God, and God would give him greater rewards for it. Maybe he did it to buy favors from God, or a better place in Heaven. Maybe a crown.
Why would Christians sacrifice their dreams in a bonfire to a god who doesn’t allow those dreams to live, and grow up, and become what God intended them to be?
This practice of sacrificing one’s heart’s desires, ones dreams and hopes and fondest wishes “for God” is so widespread in the Church that I doubt it will ever be removed from it. But I can assure you: God never asked them to do it. It never even entered His mind. It is not what He intends, desires, or condones.
In truth it is an abominable practice. God gave us things to sacrifice to Him; we are to give Him the first of our flocks and fruits — today that translates as any money-making endeavor. We are to bring His priests bread, and fruit, and the best food. We are to provide the House of God with everything it requires to function. But all of this is supposed to be given out of the surplus that God gives us: the blessing, the overflowing money and prosperity that comes from the fulfillment of the dreams we were born with.
If we sacrifice the dreams themselves, we won’t have anything else to give to God, because we have just cut off His source of giving. We have not only condemned ourselves to a life of lack and want, but also a life of living outside God’s will for our lives. If our dream was to be a baseball player, and we become a banker instead, we are not doing what God told us to do.
Do not sacrifice your children to Molech. Do not kill your dreams in some ill-fated quest to impress God somehow. God is only impressed by obedience, not by sacrifice.
“For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6)
What you give up for God is not nearly as important as what you keep for God. In fact, the keeping is much harder. Anyone can kill their dreams; but how many can follow them? And anyway, if you think that God requires for you to kill your dreams in order to follow Him to the ends of the earth, you don’t know God at all and you are probably living entirely outside His plan. Don’t blame Him if your life sucks.
7.08.2008
Ghosts
So what are ‘ghosts’?
According to popular mythology, ghosts are the ‘souls’ (actually the spirit and soul) of a departed human being. But the Bible clearly states that when a human being leaves their body, they are instantly face to face with God, and will be judged and removed to a spiritual prison, or to a spiritual paradise, depending on the outcome of the judgment.
The fact is, ghosts are not and never were human. In fact, ghosts never even had bodies to start with!
Think about it; if a ghost was a human, they would act and ‘feel’ just like that human had. But a child whose mother dies, and then who sees the ghost of their mother, is not delighted to see her. Instead, that child becomes terrified and runs away. Why? Because the ghost is not its mother. Even a little child can tell this. Only stupid adults are so dull of hearing and sensing that they can’t.
Now I will cover this at some future date with a post on what demons are; but here is a crash-course. A demon is a spiritual being who has cut itself off from the source of all life, God. That means it is hungry as all hell. All it can do to survive is literally suck spiritual energy out of the closest thing it can get near to: the Image of God, or Mankind.
It will choose a ‘host’ and cling to them, sucking out their spiritual energy. Often it does this by inflicting spiritual wounds, which then translate into a physical wound, so that the human spirit begins putting out energy to heal the wound.
When a disease or a wound does not heal, even when it should, there might be a spiritual reason. There might be a parasite.
And when that spiritual parasite finally sucks its host dry, and the host’s spirit can no longer support both the physical body and the parasite, that person dies.
But think about this: in the spiritual world, a thing resembles the energy that it is drawing from, and spiritual creatures can easily change shape and form. That is why angels are beautiful and glowing; they are drawing directly from God, who is beautiful and glowing. But a demon who is drawing energy directly from a human… what are they going to look like?
That’s right. There is an old figure in mythology around the world called the ‘doppleganger’. It is a creature able to look identical to a human. The legend goes that if you see your doppleganger, you will die. And it is often true. Why? Because you have a spiritual parasite that has been attached to you so long, it now looks like you. When it gets to that point, your spirit is probably almost sucked dry and ready to literally ‘give up the ghost’.
Why does a ghost hang around after the person has died? Simple familiarity. In fact the Bible calls them “familiar spirits”. After living off a human for five, ten, twenty years, they feel at home in that human’s home. Since most demons aren’t much smarter than dogs, or large animals, they may even continue to perform the habitual actions their host performed until death.
My brother and sister when they were young were great friends with my great-grandmother. She was a spunky and witty lady, amusing, and well able to handle her son — our grandfather — who was a little bit too strict for us. If we had a problem, we ran to ‘Nanna’ as we called her, and she would yell at grandpa for us.
After Nanna died, there was weirdness. And it wasn’t nice, spunky, amusing, or witty either. My sister and brother were in the doorway of Nanna’s old room, which they’d turned into a play room for the kids, since it was near the living room and off the main hall. Suddenly they felt a terrible chill, and a sense of fear washed over them so strong that it literally paralyzed them. They could not run, hide, or look away.
Then down the hall walked a Thing. Since the door was the type which is cut in half, so it can open on the top or bottom — and they kept the top shut most of the time to keep adults out — they could only see it from its upper waist downward. It had skin that was gray and pebbly almost like scales; it had long hooked claws on its hands and feet, like raptor’s claws, and hideous protrusions sticking out of its body. It was VERY visual, and VERY real, and they both saw the same thing as clear as daylight. They were both shocked, because their parents had spent the last few years convincing them monsters were not real.
The thing was passing by the hallway on the way to the bathroom, following the exact same route that Nanna used to take, and they could both sense with the heightened awareness of the spirit that this thing was pretending to BE Nanna.
Was it?
Ha. Even to ask the question is stupid. Of course that wasn’t Nanna… it was a creature of death, probably the same creature that had come and assassinated her.
Let me give you a little tip on how to identify evil: evil has a stench like a skunk that exudes from it. It can’t make this stench go away, even if it wants to. It can’t hide it, or mask it, or lessen it. The stench is pure, unadulterated fear. When that wash of fear comes over you — when that coldness comes through your body like you just fell through the ice into antarctic water — when you are paralyzed and cannot look away — you are not seeing something from God, nor are you seeing the spirit of a human.
That’s a demon. Got it?
“Ghosts” are just demons. Usually they are the one that killed whatever human they are pretending to be. They are thieves, and liars. Being the ultimate in low self-esteem, they will steal a human identity, even going so far in their insanity to talk like that human, dress and act like them, and impersonate them in every way. Remember, Satan wanted to “be like God”, and Adam was created “in the Image of God”. In other words, to be “like God”, all a demon has to do is copy you.
Spiritists and people who perform seances often speak to these pretenders, and get very impressed that they are talking to Napoleon or some famous inventor.
Wake up, guys. You are not talking to the person you think you’re talking to. Sure, those spirits were around when those great persons were alive; spirits are immortal. They watched that person’s life. They may have even been a parasite, helping to suck their life away. So congratulations… you have just contacted, not a great departed human spirit, but their murderer.
This is why the Bible very clearly tells us not to talk to ‘spirits’ or dabble with ‘spirits of the dead’. God is just looking out for us here; you don’t want one of those murderous parasites to decide you look like a tasty snack and latch on. Just leave them alone, and go to God for help if you have one. He can get it off you.
According to popular mythology, ghosts are the ‘souls’ (actually the spirit and soul) of a departed human being. But the Bible clearly states that when a human being leaves their body, they are instantly face to face with God, and will be judged and removed to a spiritual prison, or to a spiritual paradise, depending on the outcome of the judgment.
The fact is, ghosts are not and never were human. In fact, ghosts never even had bodies to start with!
Think about it; if a ghost was a human, they would act and ‘feel’ just like that human had. But a child whose mother dies, and then who sees the ghost of their mother, is not delighted to see her. Instead, that child becomes terrified and runs away. Why? Because the ghost is not its mother. Even a little child can tell this. Only stupid adults are so dull of hearing and sensing that they can’t.
Now I will cover this at some future date with a post on what demons are; but here is a crash-course. A demon is a spiritual being who has cut itself off from the source of all life, God. That means it is hungry as all hell. All it can do to survive is literally suck spiritual energy out of the closest thing it can get near to: the Image of God, or Mankind.
It will choose a ‘host’ and cling to them, sucking out their spiritual energy. Often it does this by inflicting spiritual wounds, which then translate into a physical wound, so that the human spirit begins putting out energy to heal the wound.
When a disease or a wound does not heal, even when it should, there might be a spiritual reason. There might be a parasite.
And when that spiritual parasite finally sucks its host dry, and the host’s spirit can no longer support both the physical body and the parasite, that person dies.
But think about this: in the spiritual world, a thing resembles the energy that it is drawing from, and spiritual creatures can easily change shape and form. That is why angels are beautiful and glowing; they are drawing directly from God, who is beautiful and glowing. But a demon who is drawing energy directly from a human… what are they going to look like?
That’s right. There is an old figure in mythology around the world called the ‘doppleganger’. It is a creature able to look identical to a human. The legend goes that if you see your doppleganger, you will die. And it is often true. Why? Because you have a spiritual parasite that has been attached to you so long, it now looks like you. When it gets to that point, your spirit is probably almost sucked dry and ready to literally ‘give up the ghost’.
Why does a ghost hang around after the person has died? Simple familiarity. In fact the Bible calls them “familiar spirits”. After living off a human for five, ten, twenty years, they feel at home in that human’s home. Since most demons aren’t much smarter than dogs, or large animals, they may even continue to perform the habitual actions their host performed until death.
My brother and sister when they were young were great friends with my great-grandmother. She was a spunky and witty lady, amusing, and well able to handle her son — our grandfather — who was a little bit too strict for us. If we had a problem, we ran to ‘Nanna’ as we called her, and she would yell at grandpa for us.
After Nanna died, there was weirdness. And it wasn’t nice, spunky, amusing, or witty either. My sister and brother were in the doorway of Nanna’s old room, which they’d turned into a play room for the kids, since it was near the living room and off the main hall. Suddenly they felt a terrible chill, and a sense of fear washed over them so strong that it literally paralyzed them. They could not run, hide, or look away.
Then down the hall walked a Thing. Since the door was the type which is cut in half, so it can open on the top or bottom — and they kept the top shut most of the time to keep adults out — they could only see it from its upper waist downward. It had skin that was gray and pebbly almost like scales; it had long hooked claws on its hands and feet, like raptor’s claws, and hideous protrusions sticking out of its body. It was VERY visual, and VERY real, and they both saw the same thing as clear as daylight. They were both shocked, because their parents had spent the last few years convincing them monsters were not real.
The thing was passing by the hallway on the way to the bathroom, following the exact same route that Nanna used to take, and they could both sense with the heightened awareness of the spirit that this thing was pretending to BE Nanna.
Was it?
Ha. Even to ask the question is stupid. Of course that wasn’t Nanna… it was a creature of death, probably the same creature that had come and assassinated her.
Let me give you a little tip on how to identify evil: evil has a stench like a skunk that exudes from it. It can’t make this stench go away, even if it wants to. It can’t hide it, or mask it, or lessen it. The stench is pure, unadulterated fear. When that wash of fear comes over you — when that coldness comes through your body like you just fell through the ice into antarctic water — when you are paralyzed and cannot look away — you are not seeing something from God, nor are you seeing the spirit of a human.
That’s a demon. Got it?
“Ghosts” are just demons. Usually they are the one that killed whatever human they are pretending to be. They are thieves, and liars. Being the ultimate in low self-esteem, they will steal a human identity, even going so far in their insanity to talk like that human, dress and act like them, and impersonate them in every way. Remember, Satan wanted to “be like God”, and Adam was created “in the Image of God”. In other words, to be “like God”, all a demon has to do is copy you.
Spiritists and people who perform seances often speak to these pretenders, and get very impressed that they are talking to Napoleon or some famous inventor.
Wake up, guys. You are not talking to the person you think you’re talking to. Sure, those spirits were around when those great persons were alive; spirits are immortal. They watched that person’s life. They may have even been a parasite, helping to suck their life away. So congratulations… you have just contacted, not a great departed human spirit, but their murderer.
This is why the Bible very clearly tells us not to talk to ‘spirits’ or dabble with ‘spirits of the dead’. God is just looking out for us here; you don’t want one of those murderous parasites to decide you look like a tasty snack and latch on. Just leave them alone, and go to God for help if you have one. He can get it off you.
Spirit, Soul, Body
You hear a lot about the soul and the body, but you almost never hear about the spirit. People say it this way: “Body and soul”. Notice they put the body first, and the soul second… and the spirit is just not mentioned as if it doesn’t exist. In fact, most people don’t know that it exists.
There are in fact three pieces to a human being, and if you are missing one of them you can’t function very well or happily at all. If you are missing a body… well… you’re dead. If you are missing a soul, or a part of a soul, then you are either retarded or psychologically damaged. If you are missing your spirit — which most people are — you’ll feel like there is a huge hole inside you for the rest of your life.
In brief, and we will explain all of this as we go:
A human being is made up of nine basic parts, grouped into three units: the spirit, the soul, and the body. Each of these packages exists in a different dimension, yet it takes all three to make one human. If a human is missing one of these parts, they are not whole.
We will start with the bit most people are most familiar with: the body. The body exists in the physical world; it is made out of physical matter. It is your ‘tent’ or ‘house’. Now I must stress this: your body is NOT you, it is merely the physical vessel that you are living in. If you were to climb out of your body, you would still look identical to you: same eyes, same hair, same everything, even the same clothes sometimes! You would still have all your same memories, your same thought processes. In fact, if you were out of your body, you wouldn’t be able to tell that you were out, except for the fact that you would feel much lighter, and you would look down and see your body on the floor. Believe me, it really surprises a lot of people when that happens.
Right now science is just beginning to come to the slow and dawning realization (they’re kind of like retarded kids, aren’t they?) that genetics and DNA is not enough to determine how you are going to look and act. We just don’t have enough bits in there to describe all the complexity of a human being. The fact that the human genome is almost identical to a sheep or a pig’s genome really confuses them. If most of the DNA strand is the same, why are we so dramatically different in every way?
They have the same problem with the brain; there is not enough neural activity going on in your brain to store all the memories and mental abilities you have. So where are the extra memories? You don’t lose them… but we are just not using enough of our brains to have everything stored, like a computer, in electrical impulses.
Science explains this away like usual by saying, “it’s a mystery. It is more wonderful than we ever imagined, and someday in the future, maybe, someone will discover the secret.”
Bull. The secret is discovered right now. I’ll tell it to you.
The physical world is made of a bunch of atoms. Atoms are made out of energy that is so condensed that it has become physical. Scientists are confused because they don’t really understand why atoms stick together in the shapes that they are in: why do protons and neutrons stick together, when there is nothing we can see that holds a neutral particle and a positively charged particle together? Why does the electron orbit the nucleus, instead of just magnetizing to the protons and sticking there?
There are theories, but the fact of the matter is this: the physical world is in the shape you see because it is hanging on a template. The physical is not enough. You need two more layers of reality to shape the physical world into the form it is in, and to hold it there.
The template that the physical world hangs from is made out of energy, too, but it is not visible energy. It is invisible because it is moving a little faster than light itself, rendering it completely insubstantial to us. We can’t see it, hear it, feel it, smell it… sometimes we get glimpses or hints of this other world, but for the most part it’s totally out of our reach.
This other world is commonly called the spiritual world. It is just as real as the physical world, and in fact, looks almost just like it. It is full of creatures just like our planet is. It has cities, inhabitants, rules, physics… at this point I would not be surprised if it has cell phones and microwaves. That would explain why so many people see things like angels dressed in modern clothes wearing sunglasses… (read The Spiritual World (coming soon) for more on that subject). But we’ll get into that more when we get to the spirit.
The soul and the spirit exist in the framework of the spiritual world, or as I like to call it, the etherial world. But the body does not; by definition the body is outside that world. Until we get better scientific equipment that can actually perceive and measure the soulical and spiritual worlds, we are stuck only being able to perceive and measure the physical world. This means we can only gather 1/3rd of the data we really need to understand ourselves.
In short, what you look like as a spiritual being is what your body looks like. Have you ever noticed how rage, or insanity, or some strong and powerful emotion like love can actually change the physical appearance of a person? If you didn’t know about this, it would do you good to study it a little: eye color, skin color, facial features, and hair color can all change in a matter of minutes when someone is under extreme pressure of some kind, either good or bad.
There is one recorded case of a dark-haired man who almost went of Niagara Falls. When they managed to rescue him about three hours later, his entire head of hair was white. And it is well known to those who study abnormal psychology that anyone who suffers from M.P.D. (Multiple Personality Disorder, the scientific term for demon-possession) will completely change their facial features, eye, and hair color when another ‘personality’ takes over.
If your spirit and soul are ugly, they will make your body ugly even if technically it looks great (notice how beautiful celebrities become hideous after they start heavily sinning). If your spirit and soul are beautiful, even if your physical body is nothing special, they will make you “sparkle” and be absolutely gorgeous in a way nobody can define. This is because the physical world is actually a slave to the etherial world. Whatever happens in the etherial world first will happen inevitably in the physical.
This is why magic is real. It is not good, but it’s real, and it works. This is also why a variety of religions can produce “miracles” and effect the physical world in certain ways. Anyone can learn to control the physical universe; If you change something ethereally, the physical has to change. It has no choice, because the physical ‘hangs’ from the template of the spiritual.
Biblically the body is made of three parts: the bone, the flesh, and the blood. Structure is in the bone, movement is in the flesh, and the life is in the blood. Organs are special, because flesh and blood mingle there.
The soul is an intangible, insubstantial structure made out of spiritual energy. It is not you, either, just like the body is not ‘you’. In fact, your soul is pretty much nothing but a big computer. It is your day-timer. It is your secretary. It is your toolbox and your playpen. But it is not “you”.
The soul is made of three parts also: the mind, the emotions, and the will. (Notice how people get those out of order all the time too.) With the mind comes structure (logic); with the emotions comes movement (motivation), and with the will comes life (what you have is what you chose).
The soul dwells inside your physical body, and certain parts of your soul have correlations to the body. People make a great study out of this, but I don’t know much more than that about it right now and don’t care. Your physical brain tends to get active on one side of the brain or the other when you use your soul; that is because the body is reacting to the movement of the soul. The brain is not CAUSING the thought or emotion to happen, the brain is RESPONDING to a thought or emotion that begins in the soul and travels to the brain.
The job of the brain is to translate the etherial things of the soul into physical sounds, motions, and other physical-world reactions. That is all the brain is for. The brain is just a steering wheel, not the driver. This is why someone in a coma can hear people talking perfectly fine, can sometimes even see with their eye shut, but they cannot respond: their body is in the “off” position, but their soul and spirit are “on”. The same goes for retarded persons; their soul and spirit are fine. They are perfectly normal. But their body is broken somehow, and it cannot translate soulical impulses correctly into the physical world. Don’t assume someone is less than you just because their body isn’t working right at the moment.
Now I have to make this clear as well: the will is not “you”. The will is a tool that “you” use. Logic and emotion are sorting mechanisms: you load up some data, and spin it through the machines. Logic will sort it according to priorities, lists, whatever you’ve programmed your mind to do with it. Emotion will pull out the motivating factors, and identify what is dynamic in an emotional way. After that, your will loads everything up on the scales, and reports dutifully to the real “you” what it has concluded. After that, it’s up to you to push the “go” button and make the choice, one way or another.
If the “real you” was your will, you would always choose the right thing, like a robot programmed to do what is most efficient. After your mind and emotions sorted the stuff out, and your will gave its little report, the will would automatically choose the more beneficial result without hesitation, because it is the will’s job to weigh things on the scales and decide which one is better.
But how many times have we made a choice that we knew was just downright stupid, and we walked away knowing we were going to regret it? That was our dutiful little soul-computer telling us what our spirit already knew. No, your spirit is in charge, not your soul.
This is the “real you”. This is the personality you know as yourself, the mental voice you talk to yourself with. This is the overriding monarch of the human triumvirate.
Your spirit is in charge of all the others. It sits on top, and within the spirit exist the sense of morality, all artistic and inspired ability, true brilliance and inspiration, and powerful gifts for every endeavor of Man. If a person is truly skilled at something, really has a ‘knack’ for it, that ability is coming out of his spirit. On the other hand, if a person merely trains their soul to do something but they’re as dry and dead as an old pile of pine needles (and boring as hell), that is because their spirit actually has no ability to do that thing; they are just doing it by robotic soulical rote.
We can tell the difference. We can tell when someone has spiritual power. We can sense it like we can sense the heat from a fire. A leader has “charisma” because he has spiritual gifts; he is dead-boring (and usually very bad at his job) if he don’t.
Out of the spirit also comes real love, real faith, and real dreams. Fully knowing that something in the future will happen is faith; that is in the spirit only. The soul cannot understand it, because the soul is merely a machine that deals with tangible measurable facts; and something that hasn’t happened yet cannot be measured or sorted. But the spirit knows it will happen, and the spirit is right.
The spirit is the source of what we call “hunches” and “gut instinct”, and also “common sense”. All of this comes through the spiritual senses that pick up clues from the spiritual world that the rest of us cannot see, hear, touch, or interact with.
The spirit is the source of the electrical energy that actually runs the soul and body. While the spirit is present, the body lives. If the spirit departs, the body is “dead”, just like turning off a light switch. The spirit can get out of the body any time it wants, and some people even have trouble ‘falling out’ of their bodies. This is known as OBE’s, or Out of Body Experiences. It also happens to people who are seriously injured or near death, since their link to their physical body is growing very weak at that point.
All ‘psychic’ phenomenon are simply the natural functioning of the spirit. Your spirit, seeing as it is almost identical to your body (because the physical copies the spiritual) has eyes, ears, a mouth, and all the various senses that your body has. The only difference is, those senses operate in the spiritual, not the physical, world. Since the spiritual world is superior to the physical world, should it really surprise us then that our spirits have superior senses and ways of sensing?
How do you know that you’re not walking around, spiritually screaming out your thoughts all the time? Most people are so spiritually deaf, they could never hear themselves, much less anyone else…
The spirit of humans and I can only assume animals and spiritual creatures as well (those creatures that live in the spiritual realm, which is perfectly real) all draw the energy they use from the source of all spiritual power, which is God. He explains in the Bible that he gives life to everything freely, good or bad. If He didn’t exist, even the demons would just vanish; which is why their determined and insane war to destroy God and take His place is so laughable.
Most people’s spirits are so weak that they can barely run their soul and body. Weak spirits seem ‘dead’ or ‘asleep’ because they are so focused on just keeping the soul and body alive, that they cannot spare any but the tiniest amount of energy and attention for the higher matters, such as inspiration, artistic ability, real love, and gifts. The “pipeline” that goes from God to a spirit gets clogged up when that spirit hates and turns against God. The more you resist, the less spiritual energy flows down, and the weaker your spirit becomes. It’s just a matter of physics, here, guys.
The physical body heals itself using energy. The duplication and repair of cells takes energy. This energy is not entirely physical energy; remember, the physical structure is made of compressed electricity. Just to hold your cells together takes so much energy, we cannot calculate it.
Most of the energy it takes to heal a wound is drawn out of the spirit through the soul. That is why a person’s soulical (emotional, mental, and will) states can determine if a patient at a hospital lives or dies; the more emotionally depressed, the more he chooses to die, the more he will cut off the spiritual energy necessary for healing. When a person’s spirit becomes too weak to support the large mass of the body anymore, the spiritual link between body and spirit (the soul included in the spirit) snaps, and the person loses their spirit — it drifts off to wherever it’s headed — and they “die”.
When a spirit leaves a body, it cannot remain on the earth. There is a fallacy taught on the earth that ‘ghosts’, or the spirits of human beings, can walk around just fine on the earth after they lose their body.
In fact, the way a human being is made, that is impossible. To remain anchored to the physical earth, we MUST be physical. Only a spiritual creature that was made to exist solely in the spiritual world could walk around on the earth ‘without a body’ or as a ‘ghost’. The Bible clearly says that to leave the body is to come to face to face with God; at that point a person is judged by Him, and they are taken to wherever they need to be. For more on this, read my post “Ghosts”.
The spirit is also made of three parts: interestingly, because we are made in the “Image of God”, they can correspond quite neatly to the Trinity; the Father, Son, Spirit. The spirit is made of severity, mercy, and life. Severity corresponds to structure, the feminine aspect, and the Spirit; Mercy corresponds to movement, the masculine element, and the Son, and Life is the Crown; it corresponds to the Father who has all (good) things within Himself. (Bad is just the absence of God, like shadow is the absence of light.)
There are in fact three pieces to a human being, and if you are missing one of them you can’t function very well or happily at all. If you are missing a body… well… you’re dead. If you are missing a soul, or a part of a soul, then you are either retarded or psychologically damaged. If you are missing your spirit — which most people are — you’ll feel like there is a huge hole inside you for the rest of your life.
In brief, and we will explain all of this as we go:
A human being is made up of nine basic parts, grouped into three units: the spirit, the soul, and the body. Each of these packages exists in a different dimension, yet it takes all three to make one human. If a human is missing one of these parts, they are not whole.
The Body
We will start with the bit most people are most familiar with: the body. The body exists in the physical world; it is made out of physical matter. It is your ‘tent’ or ‘house’. Now I must stress this: your body is NOT you, it is merely the physical vessel that you are living in. If you were to climb out of your body, you would still look identical to you: same eyes, same hair, same everything, even the same clothes sometimes! You would still have all your same memories, your same thought processes. In fact, if you were out of your body, you wouldn’t be able to tell that you were out, except for the fact that you would feel much lighter, and you would look down and see your body on the floor. Believe me, it really surprises a lot of people when that happens.
Right now science is just beginning to come to the slow and dawning realization (they’re kind of like retarded kids, aren’t they?) that genetics and DNA is not enough to determine how you are going to look and act. We just don’t have enough bits in there to describe all the complexity of a human being. The fact that the human genome is almost identical to a sheep or a pig’s genome really confuses them. If most of the DNA strand is the same, why are we so dramatically different in every way?
They have the same problem with the brain; there is not enough neural activity going on in your brain to store all the memories and mental abilities you have. So where are the extra memories? You don’t lose them… but we are just not using enough of our brains to have everything stored, like a computer, in electrical impulses.
Science explains this away like usual by saying, “it’s a mystery. It is more wonderful than we ever imagined, and someday in the future, maybe, someone will discover the secret.”
Bull. The secret is discovered right now. I’ll tell it to you.
The physical world is made of a bunch of atoms. Atoms are made out of energy that is so condensed that it has become physical. Scientists are confused because they don’t really understand why atoms stick together in the shapes that they are in: why do protons and neutrons stick together, when there is nothing we can see that holds a neutral particle and a positively charged particle together? Why does the electron orbit the nucleus, instead of just magnetizing to the protons and sticking there?
There are theories, but the fact of the matter is this: the physical world is in the shape you see because it is hanging on a template. The physical is not enough. You need two more layers of reality to shape the physical world into the form it is in, and to hold it there.
The template that the physical world hangs from is made out of energy, too, but it is not visible energy. It is invisible because it is moving a little faster than light itself, rendering it completely insubstantial to us. We can’t see it, hear it, feel it, smell it… sometimes we get glimpses or hints of this other world, but for the most part it’s totally out of our reach.
This other world is commonly called the spiritual world. It is just as real as the physical world, and in fact, looks almost just like it. It is full of creatures just like our planet is. It has cities, inhabitants, rules, physics… at this point I would not be surprised if it has cell phones and microwaves. That would explain why so many people see things like angels dressed in modern clothes wearing sunglasses… (read The Spiritual World (coming soon) for more on that subject). But we’ll get into that more when we get to the spirit.
The soul and the spirit exist in the framework of the spiritual world, or as I like to call it, the etherial world. But the body does not; by definition the body is outside that world. Until we get better scientific equipment that can actually perceive and measure the soulical and spiritual worlds, we are stuck only being able to perceive and measure the physical world. This means we can only gather 1/3rd of the data we really need to understand ourselves.
In short, what you look like as a spiritual being is what your body looks like. Have you ever noticed how rage, or insanity, or some strong and powerful emotion like love can actually change the physical appearance of a person? If you didn’t know about this, it would do you good to study it a little: eye color, skin color, facial features, and hair color can all change in a matter of minutes when someone is under extreme pressure of some kind, either good or bad.
There is one recorded case of a dark-haired man who almost went of Niagara Falls. When they managed to rescue him about three hours later, his entire head of hair was white. And it is well known to those who study abnormal psychology that anyone who suffers from M.P.D. (Multiple Personality Disorder, the scientific term for demon-possession) will completely change their facial features, eye, and hair color when another ‘personality’ takes over.
If your spirit and soul are ugly, they will make your body ugly even if technically it looks great (notice how beautiful celebrities become hideous after they start heavily sinning). If your spirit and soul are beautiful, even if your physical body is nothing special, they will make you “sparkle” and be absolutely gorgeous in a way nobody can define. This is because the physical world is actually a slave to the etherial world. Whatever happens in the etherial world first will happen inevitably in the physical.
This is why magic is real. It is not good, but it’s real, and it works. This is also why a variety of religions can produce “miracles” and effect the physical world in certain ways. Anyone can learn to control the physical universe; If you change something ethereally, the physical has to change. It has no choice, because the physical ‘hangs’ from the template of the spiritual.
Biblically the body is made of three parts: the bone, the flesh, and the blood. Structure is in the bone, movement is in the flesh, and the life is in the blood. Organs are special, because flesh and blood mingle there.
The Soul
The soul is an intangible, insubstantial structure made out of spiritual energy. It is not you, either, just like the body is not ‘you’. In fact, your soul is pretty much nothing but a big computer. It is your day-timer. It is your secretary. It is your toolbox and your playpen. But it is not “you”.
The soul is made of three parts also: the mind, the emotions, and the will. (Notice how people get those out of order all the time too.) With the mind comes structure (logic); with the emotions comes movement (motivation), and with the will comes life (what you have is what you chose).
The soul dwells inside your physical body, and certain parts of your soul have correlations to the body. People make a great study out of this, but I don’t know much more than that about it right now and don’t care. Your physical brain tends to get active on one side of the brain or the other when you use your soul; that is because the body is reacting to the movement of the soul. The brain is not CAUSING the thought or emotion to happen, the brain is RESPONDING to a thought or emotion that begins in the soul and travels to the brain.
The job of the brain is to translate the etherial things of the soul into physical sounds, motions, and other physical-world reactions. That is all the brain is for. The brain is just a steering wheel, not the driver. This is why someone in a coma can hear people talking perfectly fine, can sometimes even see with their eye shut, but they cannot respond: their body is in the “off” position, but their soul and spirit are “on”. The same goes for retarded persons; their soul and spirit are fine. They are perfectly normal. But their body is broken somehow, and it cannot translate soulical impulses correctly into the physical world. Don’t assume someone is less than you just because their body isn’t working right at the moment.
Now I have to make this clear as well: the will is not “you”. The will is a tool that “you” use. Logic and emotion are sorting mechanisms: you load up some data, and spin it through the machines. Logic will sort it according to priorities, lists, whatever you’ve programmed your mind to do with it. Emotion will pull out the motivating factors, and identify what is dynamic in an emotional way. After that, your will loads everything up on the scales, and reports dutifully to the real “you” what it has concluded. After that, it’s up to you to push the “go” button and make the choice, one way or another.
If the “real you” was your will, you would always choose the right thing, like a robot programmed to do what is most efficient. After your mind and emotions sorted the stuff out, and your will gave its little report, the will would automatically choose the more beneficial result without hesitation, because it is the will’s job to weigh things on the scales and decide which one is better.
But how many times have we made a choice that we knew was just downright stupid, and we walked away knowing we were going to regret it? That was our dutiful little soul-computer telling us what our spirit already knew. No, your spirit is in charge, not your soul.
The Spirit
This is the “real you”. This is the personality you know as yourself, the mental voice you talk to yourself with. This is the overriding monarch of the human triumvirate.
Your spirit is in charge of all the others. It sits on top, and within the spirit exist the sense of morality, all artistic and inspired ability, true brilliance and inspiration, and powerful gifts for every endeavor of Man. If a person is truly skilled at something, really has a ‘knack’ for it, that ability is coming out of his spirit. On the other hand, if a person merely trains their soul to do something but they’re as dry and dead as an old pile of pine needles (and boring as hell), that is because their spirit actually has no ability to do that thing; they are just doing it by robotic soulical rote.
We can tell the difference. We can tell when someone has spiritual power. We can sense it like we can sense the heat from a fire. A leader has “charisma” because he has spiritual gifts; he is dead-boring (and usually very bad at his job) if he don’t.
Out of the spirit also comes real love, real faith, and real dreams. Fully knowing that something in the future will happen is faith; that is in the spirit only. The soul cannot understand it, because the soul is merely a machine that deals with tangible measurable facts; and something that hasn’t happened yet cannot be measured or sorted. But the spirit knows it will happen, and the spirit is right.
The spirit is the source of what we call “hunches” and “gut instinct”, and also “common sense”. All of this comes through the spiritual senses that pick up clues from the spiritual world that the rest of us cannot see, hear, touch, or interact with.
The spirit is the source of the electrical energy that actually runs the soul and body. While the spirit is present, the body lives. If the spirit departs, the body is “dead”, just like turning off a light switch. The spirit can get out of the body any time it wants, and some people even have trouble ‘falling out’ of their bodies. This is known as OBE’s, or Out of Body Experiences. It also happens to people who are seriously injured or near death, since their link to their physical body is growing very weak at that point.
All ‘psychic’ phenomenon are simply the natural functioning of the spirit. Your spirit, seeing as it is almost identical to your body (because the physical copies the spiritual) has eyes, ears, a mouth, and all the various senses that your body has. The only difference is, those senses operate in the spiritual, not the physical, world. Since the spiritual world is superior to the physical world, should it really surprise us then that our spirits have superior senses and ways of sensing?
How do you know that you’re not walking around, spiritually screaming out your thoughts all the time? Most people are so spiritually deaf, they could never hear themselves, much less anyone else…
The spirit of humans and I can only assume animals and spiritual creatures as well (those creatures that live in the spiritual realm, which is perfectly real) all draw the energy they use from the source of all spiritual power, which is God. He explains in the Bible that he gives life to everything freely, good or bad. If He didn’t exist, even the demons would just vanish; which is why their determined and insane war to destroy God and take His place is so laughable.
Most people’s spirits are so weak that they can barely run their soul and body. Weak spirits seem ‘dead’ or ‘asleep’ because they are so focused on just keeping the soul and body alive, that they cannot spare any but the tiniest amount of energy and attention for the higher matters, such as inspiration, artistic ability, real love, and gifts. The “pipeline” that goes from God to a spirit gets clogged up when that spirit hates and turns against God. The more you resist, the less spiritual energy flows down, and the weaker your spirit becomes. It’s just a matter of physics, here, guys.
The physical body heals itself using energy. The duplication and repair of cells takes energy. This energy is not entirely physical energy; remember, the physical structure is made of compressed electricity. Just to hold your cells together takes so much energy, we cannot calculate it.
Most of the energy it takes to heal a wound is drawn out of the spirit through the soul. That is why a person’s soulical (emotional, mental, and will) states can determine if a patient at a hospital lives or dies; the more emotionally depressed, the more he chooses to die, the more he will cut off the spiritual energy necessary for healing. When a person’s spirit becomes too weak to support the large mass of the body anymore, the spiritual link between body and spirit (the soul included in the spirit) snaps, and the person loses their spirit — it drifts off to wherever it’s headed — and they “die”.
When a spirit leaves a body, it cannot remain on the earth. There is a fallacy taught on the earth that ‘ghosts’, or the spirits of human beings, can walk around just fine on the earth after they lose their body.
In fact, the way a human being is made, that is impossible. To remain anchored to the physical earth, we MUST be physical. Only a spiritual creature that was made to exist solely in the spiritual world could walk around on the earth ‘without a body’ or as a ‘ghost’. The Bible clearly says that to leave the body is to come to face to face with God; at that point a person is judged by Him, and they are taken to wherever they need to be. For more on this, read my post “Ghosts”.
The spirit is also made of three parts: interestingly, because we are made in the “Image of God”, they can correspond quite neatly to the Trinity; the Father, Son, Spirit. The spirit is made of severity, mercy, and life. Severity corresponds to structure, the feminine aspect, and the Spirit; Mercy corresponds to movement, the masculine element, and the Son, and Life is the Crown; it corresponds to the Father who has all (good) things within Himself. (Bad is just the absence of God, like shadow is the absence of light.)
Drugs and Insanity
Drugs make it all better, as they said in Trainspotting: “putting up with jobs money and other people and all that shiite, that doen nae matter when yeh hav a true and sincere smack habit.” (Quote is approximate.) Or as a poster I once saw said: “Drugs: Because Reality Needs Photoshop Filters”.
The fact is, humans need to get high. It’s true! The spirit of man, when it is really unhappy (as is the case with this crappy world we are all suffering in right now) needs to get high to feel better; and really happy people want to get high to celebrate.
The problem comes with ‘synthetic highs’. Frankly, drugs and chemically-induced highs don’t cut it. They aren’t enough. If they were enough, everyone would be on drugs and perfectly happy to remain so. But after the first few hits, when you “catch the rainbow” as a friend of mine said, you can’t quite ever attain that magnificent perfect state of spiritual glory again. And after you’ve gone a ways down the road to being well and truly addicted, the sadness kicks in of realizing that you will NEVER catch it.
So people switch from drug to drug, trying to catch that rainbow, catching maybe a glimpse of it here and there. This doesn’t just apply to hard drugs either; it applies to legal anti-depressants, marijuana, and even alcohol. All of them have a ‘high’ that their adherents keep trying to catch; every time they get high or drunk, they are going for that “perfect drunk” where it’s like the first time again and again.
But where does humanity get this need? Did God really make us like this?
Yes, but because we are completely ignorant of the way the human being works, we are not doing it the way God made us to do it. That is why chemical drugs are not enough… we need more. We are doing it WRONG.
First, if you haven’t already, read the article: “Spirit, Soul, Body”, then come back and read the rest of this.
Now, understanding that the human has a spirit, a soul, and a body and that there is a spiritual world to interact with, it seems strange that we walk along through life never using our spirit at all. We usually never see into the spiritual world. Little children do more than adults, because children haven’t trained their brains not to see certain things.
It is a fact, and I don’t remember the name of the researcher and his institute at the moment (I learned this in psychology class in college and God only knows where my class notes went), but a good study showed a few years back that the human brain is actually capable of learning not to see things. When trained not to see, for example, a blue ball; a man could walk into a room and there was no way for him to actually visually lay hold of the blue ball placed into the room. His eyes could look right at it, but his brain would not be picking up anything.
This is because the eyes don’t actually see. What they do is gather in formation and send it to the brain, where the soul then sorts the information and generates a picture. We actually are filling in gaps in our vision all the time, using this natural computer-generated effect to make our vision (which is actually a lot spottier and less accurate than we think it is) more complete. A person with an actual hole in his rods and cones can, by retraining his brain, fill that hole in so that he visually sees no hole at all.
A child hasn’t learned to do this yet, so they see a lot of things that adults cannot see. How many times have you seen a face, a strange light, a full-bodied figure out of the corner of your vision and instantly dismissed it as ‘imagination’ without even thinking about it? More than you would like to admit. Probably you aren’t even aware that you’re doing it. It takes a little concentration and a lot of patience, but if you start really paying attention to what your eyes are seeing, instead of just waving everything off as ‘imagination’, you might be really surprised by what is actually registering.
We can see things that look physical to us because we have a spirit that can see and interact with the spiritual world. Our soul is a filter that usually blanks out these spiritual visions, because we don’t want to see them.
But the brain can be turned off. This is exactly what happens when we get high and get really drunk. Our physical brain goes into emergency shut-down mode, and our soul is overloaded (mind, will, emotions) so that it, too, shuts down temporarily. Because we have overtaxed our system with poisons, our spirit takes sole control of our entire humanity.
How many times do drunks get emotionally out of control? How many times do they make stupid decisions they never would have made if they were sober? How many times does their logic break down, and they do things that make no sense? This is because they have “bombed” their soul (to use a computer term) in order to feel the spiritual world for just a moment.
The spirit cannot feel tired; it does not notice the passage of time. It can easily block out and often will not notice certain signals, like pain or sickness. In a spiritual state, a person feels joyful and alive. Artistic abilities are heightened, because art is a spiritual ability. Also too, inspiration is spiritual. They see things in a spiritual light, startling revelations will come from the smallest and most insignificant objects; a single flower petal can put a spiritually high person into raptures.
It is actually entering the spiritual state itself, not the drugs, which generate the “high” that we are all so needful of. But continually getting high, and taxing the resources of the spirit again and again, takes a toll; that is why the ‘rainbow’ becomes harder and harder to reach. The spirit is just getting plain tired.
Forcing the human being into a spiritual state by removing the functioning of the body and the soul, however, is not only dangerous but induces an inferior high that is easily sabotaged. The spirit is running on low power anyway, and even a small evil encounter can hijack a weak spirit and make their life hell. Instead, we are supposed to be entering a spiritual state by upping the amperage of our spirit to such high levels that it literally overwhelms the soul and the body, leaving their functions intact.
This is where God comes in. God is the source of all spiritual power. We are not. Our spirits have to draw power from another spiritual source; which is why those who enter a ‘false’ spiritual state through drugs or other chemicals often latch onto very dark and ugly spiritual energy, because they are the trash that is nearby. Those man-eating spiders you saw? Yah, those were real. They just weren’t physical, they were in the spiritual dimension, but they were real. And they aren’t nice, so be smart and stop taking drugs.
God on the other hand, on request, will pump the spirit of a person so full of energy that they will be bursting at the seams. They can fly into a spiritual high at any moment, and because the soul is still intact and is not shut off, they can also still reason, feel emotions properly, and make controlled decisions of the will.
The spiritual high from God is going to be a lot more powerful, a lot ‘higher’, and you can catch the rainbow every single time. In fact, each time you get high the spirit will grow stronger and more able to hold larger amounts of spiritual energy, so each high is better than the last.
And God, unlike drugs, is free. I highly recommend God over crystal meth. He’s more fun.
The reason I included “Insanity” in the title of the article is because insanity is also a kind of high. Except this time the person is using their spirit to override their soul and body by faith, without the use of chemicals. They believe they can see or hear something, so they dampen their soul and body down to the point where they can see and hear more clearly in the spirit realm. This is kind of like turning down the radio, so you can hear a distant noise outside more clearly.
What they see and hear, however, is usually not worth meddling with. They get really excited that it’s real… they really can see and hear it… sure, that’s fine. But what are the benefits of being able to see and hear talking frogs with fangs? Really?
Or what is the benefit of allowing another spiritual being to enter one’s body, because it says it is the departed spirit of Charlemagne or something? (When, in fact, human spirits do NOT remain on earth after death: see my post “Ghosts” for more on that topic.)
Being able to see and hear the spiritual world by belief alone shows that a person has a great faith-muscle, but that is all. Unless one is seeing and hearing God, and His spiritual servants, there is really no point. All the spiritual creatures that are exiled to this earth and do not follow God are all crazy, nasty, and dirty, and we as human beings really don’t want them. They aren’t worth our time, unless you really LIKE kissing cockroaches…
The fact is, humans need to get high. It’s true! The spirit of man, when it is really unhappy (as is the case with this crappy world we are all suffering in right now) needs to get high to feel better; and really happy people want to get high to celebrate.
The problem comes with ‘synthetic highs’. Frankly, drugs and chemically-induced highs don’t cut it. They aren’t enough. If they were enough, everyone would be on drugs and perfectly happy to remain so. But after the first few hits, when you “catch the rainbow” as a friend of mine said, you can’t quite ever attain that magnificent perfect state of spiritual glory again. And after you’ve gone a ways down the road to being well and truly addicted, the sadness kicks in of realizing that you will NEVER catch it.
So people switch from drug to drug, trying to catch that rainbow, catching maybe a glimpse of it here and there. This doesn’t just apply to hard drugs either; it applies to legal anti-depressants, marijuana, and even alcohol. All of them have a ‘high’ that their adherents keep trying to catch; every time they get high or drunk, they are going for that “perfect drunk” where it’s like the first time again and again.
But where does humanity get this need? Did God really make us like this?
Yes, but because we are completely ignorant of the way the human being works, we are not doing it the way God made us to do it. That is why chemical drugs are not enough… we need more. We are doing it WRONG.
First, if you haven’t already, read the article: “Spirit, Soul, Body”, then come back and read the rest of this.
Now, understanding that the human has a spirit, a soul, and a body and that there is a spiritual world to interact with, it seems strange that we walk along through life never using our spirit at all. We usually never see into the spiritual world. Little children do more than adults, because children haven’t trained their brains not to see certain things.
It is a fact, and I don’t remember the name of the researcher and his institute at the moment (I learned this in psychology class in college and God only knows where my class notes went), but a good study showed a few years back that the human brain is actually capable of learning not to see things. When trained not to see, for example, a blue ball; a man could walk into a room and there was no way for him to actually visually lay hold of the blue ball placed into the room. His eyes could look right at it, but his brain would not be picking up anything.
This is because the eyes don’t actually see. What they do is gather in formation and send it to the brain, where the soul then sorts the information and generates a picture. We actually are filling in gaps in our vision all the time, using this natural computer-generated effect to make our vision (which is actually a lot spottier and less accurate than we think it is) more complete. A person with an actual hole in his rods and cones can, by retraining his brain, fill that hole in so that he visually sees no hole at all.
A child hasn’t learned to do this yet, so they see a lot of things that adults cannot see. How many times have you seen a face, a strange light, a full-bodied figure out of the corner of your vision and instantly dismissed it as ‘imagination’ without even thinking about it? More than you would like to admit. Probably you aren’t even aware that you’re doing it. It takes a little concentration and a lot of patience, but if you start really paying attention to what your eyes are seeing, instead of just waving everything off as ‘imagination’, you might be really surprised by what is actually registering.
We can see things that look physical to us because we have a spirit that can see and interact with the spiritual world. Our soul is a filter that usually blanks out these spiritual visions, because we don’t want to see them.
But the brain can be turned off. This is exactly what happens when we get high and get really drunk. Our physical brain goes into emergency shut-down mode, and our soul is overloaded (mind, will, emotions) so that it, too, shuts down temporarily. Because we have overtaxed our system with poisons, our spirit takes sole control of our entire humanity.
How many times do drunks get emotionally out of control? How many times do they make stupid decisions they never would have made if they were sober? How many times does their logic break down, and they do things that make no sense? This is because they have “bombed” their soul (to use a computer term) in order to feel the spiritual world for just a moment.
The spirit cannot feel tired; it does not notice the passage of time. It can easily block out and often will not notice certain signals, like pain or sickness. In a spiritual state, a person feels joyful and alive. Artistic abilities are heightened, because art is a spiritual ability. Also too, inspiration is spiritual. They see things in a spiritual light, startling revelations will come from the smallest and most insignificant objects; a single flower petal can put a spiritually high person into raptures.
It is actually entering the spiritual state itself, not the drugs, which generate the “high” that we are all so needful of. But continually getting high, and taxing the resources of the spirit again and again, takes a toll; that is why the ‘rainbow’ becomes harder and harder to reach. The spirit is just getting plain tired.
Forcing the human being into a spiritual state by removing the functioning of the body and the soul, however, is not only dangerous but induces an inferior high that is easily sabotaged. The spirit is running on low power anyway, and even a small evil encounter can hijack a weak spirit and make their life hell. Instead, we are supposed to be entering a spiritual state by upping the amperage of our spirit to such high levels that it literally overwhelms the soul and the body, leaving their functions intact.
This is where God comes in. God is the source of all spiritual power. We are not. Our spirits have to draw power from another spiritual source; which is why those who enter a ‘false’ spiritual state through drugs or other chemicals often latch onto very dark and ugly spiritual energy, because they are the trash that is nearby. Those man-eating spiders you saw? Yah, those were real. They just weren’t physical, they were in the spiritual dimension, but they were real. And they aren’t nice, so be smart and stop taking drugs.
God on the other hand, on request, will pump the spirit of a person so full of energy that they will be bursting at the seams. They can fly into a spiritual high at any moment, and because the soul is still intact and is not shut off, they can also still reason, feel emotions properly, and make controlled decisions of the will.
The spiritual high from God is going to be a lot more powerful, a lot ‘higher’, and you can catch the rainbow every single time. In fact, each time you get high the spirit will grow stronger and more able to hold larger amounts of spiritual energy, so each high is better than the last.
And God, unlike drugs, is free. I highly recommend God over crystal meth. He’s more fun.
The reason I included “Insanity” in the title of the article is because insanity is also a kind of high. Except this time the person is using their spirit to override their soul and body by faith, without the use of chemicals. They believe they can see or hear something, so they dampen their soul and body down to the point where they can see and hear more clearly in the spirit realm. This is kind of like turning down the radio, so you can hear a distant noise outside more clearly.
What they see and hear, however, is usually not worth meddling with. They get really excited that it’s real… they really can see and hear it… sure, that’s fine. But what are the benefits of being able to see and hear talking frogs with fangs? Really?
Or what is the benefit of allowing another spiritual being to enter one’s body, because it says it is the departed spirit of Charlemagne or something? (When, in fact, human spirits do NOT remain on earth after death: see my post “Ghosts” for more on that topic.)
Being able to see and hear the spiritual world by belief alone shows that a person has a great faith-muscle, but that is all. Unless one is seeing and hearing God, and His spiritual servants, there is really no point. All the spiritual creatures that are exiled to this earth and do not follow God are all crazy, nasty, and dirty, and we as human beings really don’t want them. They aren’t worth our time, unless you really LIKE kissing cockroaches…
7.06.2008
The Unpardonable Sin
When God can no longer help you.
I get asked sometimes, “what is the unpardonable sin”? Obviously most religious people are terrified that they are going to someday commit the unpardonable sin, and from then on out no matter what they do they’re screwed.
I have some good news for those who spend every waking moment trembling with the thought that they just might do this heinous act without knowing it: if you are worried over it and guilty, you haven’t done it. Believe me. Those who have committed the unpardonable sin end up searing their conscience during the process, so they can’t feel guilt anymore.
The fact is that the Unpardonable Sin mentioned in Mark 3:28-29 (also Matthew 12:30-32, Luke 11:14-23, Hebrews 10:26-27) is as much of a deliberate action as getting saved. You didn’t ‘accidentally’ get saved, did you? Nobody can twist your arm behind your back and make you get saved — even if maybe you feel like that is what happened — you had to have made a real decision within your heart, full-well knowing what you were doing.
You weren’t trying to become an apostle of the devil, but you accidentally got saved instead. No, you had full and clear knowledge of what you were doing. You chose, specifically, to follow Yeshua the Messiah as your King and savior and God. Period. You decided to do whatever he said, accept his Spirit into you, and to follow him even to the death.
The verses about the unpardonable sin clearly parallel the verses about getting saved:
We say one thing we get saved, we say another we get condemned. Obviously getting saved isn’t as simple as just saying any old thing out loud; you actually have to say it with your heart, say it in full belief and conviction. You can’t lie and get saved, you have to tell the full and honest truth.
Simply put, the unpardonable sin is “truthfully” rejecting Yeshua just as firmly as you received him when you got saved. When a person with their whole heart declares him or herself free from Yeshua forever, of their own free will, they have just cut him off forever. It is, in effect, reverse-salvation.
Committing the unpardonable sin is just as simple as that. But a person who is new in the faith can’t commit it accidentally — they aren’t educated enough yet. Only a person who really knows what they are doing can manage it. This is why a bunch of the Pharisees Yeshua was talking to just then did manage it: the Pharisees were the most highly educated, respected, knowledgeable religious scholars of their time. They knew what they were doing and they did it on purpose.
And don’t worry, if you ever fooled around with “rejecting Jesus” but you still feel guilty, you didn’t do it. You just played with it.
Why is it unpardonable? Won’t God forgive someone who does that?
Actually, yes He would. He would forgive anything… his blood was powerful enough to cover any transgression.
But the problem here is that the person who rejects Yeshua forever, with full knowledge of what they are doing, ends up “searing their conscience” or literally burning out their sense of conscience so that they can no longer feel with part or all of their spirit. They become permanently deaf and blind in a part of them that used to bring them to repentance. So if they never come to repent, He cannot forgive; that is the rules. You have to come ask Him to forgive before He can cleanse you.
As long as you still feel the need to come to God for forgiveness, you’re fine. The rejected ones no longer feel guilt, they no longer come to God at all. Why should they? They rejected Him, and they don’t feel bad about it in the least. I’m sure they probably feel liberated, although they will spend the rest of their truncated lives desperately searching for something to fill a huge gap inside them, and they will never find it. How happy could you be?
I get asked sometimes, “what is the unpardonable sin”? Obviously most religious people are terrified that they are going to someday commit the unpardonable sin, and from then on out no matter what they do they’re screwed.
I have some good news for those who spend every waking moment trembling with the thought that they just might do this heinous act without knowing it: if you are worried over it and guilty, you haven’t done it. Believe me. Those who have committed the unpardonable sin end up searing their conscience during the process, so they can’t feel guilt anymore.
The fact is that the Unpardonable Sin mentioned in Mark 3:28-29 (also Matthew 12:30-32, Luke 11:14-23, Hebrews 10:26-27) is as much of a deliberate action as getting saved. You didn’t ‘accidentally’ get saved, did you? Nobody can twist your arm behind your back and make you get saved — even if maybe you feel like that is what happened — you had to have made a real decision within your heart, full-well knowing what you were doing.
You weren’t trying to become an apostle of the devil, but you accidentally got saved instead. No, you had full and clear knowledge of what you were doing. You chose, specifically, to follow Yeshua the Messiah as your King and savior and God. Period. You decided to do whatever he said, accept his Spirit into you, and to follow him even to the death.
The verses about the unpardonable sin clearly parallel the verses about getting saved:
And whoever says a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. (Mat. 12:32)
That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. (Rom. 10:9)
We say one thing we get saved, we say another we get condemned. Obviously getting saved isn’t as simple as just saying any old thing out loud; you actually have to say it with your heart, say it in full belief and conviction. You can’t lie and get saved, you have to tell the full and honest truth.
Simply put, the unpardonable sin is “truthfully” rejecting Yeshua just as firmly as you received him when you got saved. When a person with their whole heart declares him or herself free from Yeshua forever, of their own free will, they have just cut him off forever. It is, in effect, reverse-salvation.
Committing the unpardonable sin is just as simple as that. But a person who is new in the faith can’t commit it accidentally — they aren’t educated enough yet. Only a person who really knows what they are doing can manage it. This is why a bunch of the Pharisees Yeshua was talking to just then did manage it: the Pharisees were the most highly educated, respected, knowledgeable religious scholars of their time. They knew what they were doing and they did it on purpose.
And don’t worry, if you ever fooled around with “rejecting Jesus” but you still feel guilty, you didn’t do it. You just played with it.
Why is it unpardonable? Won’t God forgive someone who does that?
Actually, yes He would. He would forgive anything… his blood was powerful enough to cover any transgression.
But the problem here is that the person who rejects Yeshua forever, with full knowledge of what they are doing, ends up “searing their conscience” or literally burning out their sense of conscience so that they can no longer feel with part or all of their spirit. They become permanently deaf and blind in a part of them that used to bring them to repentance. So if they never come to repent, He cannot forgive; that is the rules. You have to come ask Him to forgive before He can cleanse you.
As long as you still feel the need to come to God for forgiveness, you’re fine. The rejected ones no longer feel guilt, they no longer come to God at all. Why should they? They rejected Him, and they don’t feel bad about it in the least. I’m sure they probably feel liberated, although they will spend the rest of their truncated lives desperately searching for something to fill a huge gap inside them, and they will never find it. How happy could you be?
Gen X: Not Needed, Not Wanted
The heartache of our generation is that we are quite aware that the world around us neither wants us, nor needs us. This was glibly expressed in Fight Club: “we’re the middle children of history, man. We have no great war, we have no great depression. Our war is a psychological war; our great depression is our lives.”
Fight Club was a movie entirely centered around this problem. The ‘younger’ Generation X, those about 39 years old and younger, are not needed by anyone; no one looks up to any of us, nobody needs us or gives us any real love. Nobody even wants us around.
We take up too much space. We use too much air. We make too much trash, we eat too much food, we want too much attention. We make too much pollution. We are overcrowding the earth with too many unwanted people. All of these paranoias — most of which are actually scientifically not true — are just a symptom of the real problem: Them.
But who is ‘Them’?
My generation uses that word, capitalized, as if describing the very devil. We whisper it, we put emphasis on it: “THEM”. My parents used to ask me: who are ‘they’?
‘They’ are the elder generation, the group that includes every mature adult above us who should have wanted us, should have needed us, should have brought us into the world with delight and done everything in their power to create for us a life, and then live that life alongside us. ‘They’ are the larger archetype of our parents and grandparents and village elders, the ones who should have been the most supportive, the most delighted in us, but were in fact the most remote. ‘They’ are the elder generations who control every institute of man under which we are oppressed.
‘They’ are the betrayers of Man.
The world is too small for the selfish as long as anyone else exists in it. Our parents were often less than thrilled that we were born. How many of our parents actually sat down and planned their first pregnancy, then got pregnant on purpose? They were a child of the 60’s and 70’s when everyone just wanted to have sex… but no one wanted the children that came about because of it.
Every child born today is a survivor of a war that is destroying 1.37 million lives a year just in America (that is about 1 billion human beings in total, the total worldwide sum to date); every person of the X generation knows deep to their core that they could have been aborted. Instead, they were allowed to live; but there is a big difference between being allowed to live, and being wanted.
After that, your parents got bored of each other and divorced, and then you got tossed from one to the other like a hot potato, neither really wanting to keep you. Either that, or you got abandoned by one and dealt with by the other who is then reminded of the man she hates or the woman who left him every time that parent looked at you. Nobody wanted you. You were a mistake.
You went to Kindergarten. In school, you learned that the teacher — who had far too many kids crammed into his or her class and wasn’t being paid half of what they should have been — didn’t really want you to be there either. If the teacher had less students, they would have been a lot happier. You were surplus. Your school was not given enough money by the government (because the government officials embezzle 70% of all the finances that were supposed to go to the schools) to even feed you decent meals; you ate dog-food for lunch and you were told it was a four-square balanced diet.
You tried to find a mentor among your relatives and the friends of your parents, but learned pretty fast after a few painful experiences that they only wanted you around kind of like their pet dog: to amuse them. After they made you light the firecrackers because you didn’t know better, and you got your fingers and eyebrows burnt, or after your uncle got you drunk just to laugh as you stumbled around the room, you figured out that a mentor was never going to come into your life. Everyone is just out for themselves. It was kind of heartbreaking, but you moved on your lonely way.
For a while maybe you found acceptance among some peer-group, going to crazy lengths to be one of them, desperate because you had no other family and no one else to need or want you. You joined a gang, you took drugs, you learned to smoke, you had sex long before you were ready. You somehow survived your overcrowded High School years only to find out that as soon as High School was over and you were no longer a convenient two row’s away in English class, the friends that were so close could no longer be bothered to drive across town to see you. They had better things to do.
Determined to make it on your own, you decided to get a real education — because you knew that nobody without four degrees can actually get a job that pays anything — but discovered that the waiting lists to get in a good college are so long, they can pick and choose out of millions of prospective students, and dump all but the rarest gems. If you weren’t an A+++ student, or a full-blooded Eskimo, there was no room for you. And if you were white, forget it. America has too many white people. Only Burger King wants them.
So you dropped out of a Community College, which was overcrowded and underfunded, and got a job. But because there were 45 other people pounding on your boss’s door waving their resumés in the air, you had to kiss ass real good to stay employed. A little mean king on his little mean throne, your boss abused and mocked you every day you worked for him, until he finally fired you because he didn’t need you…
You got a girl or boyfriend, and for a moment you felt as if the world was finally right! Someone needed you! At last, for the very first time in your life, you had a focus, a center, a purpose to be living and breathing. You were thrilled beyond your ability to think. But after shopping around a little bit, your girl or boyfriend found about twenty other people they liked better than you, and dumped you for the next one. After all, there’s more fish in the sea.
You tried to become an artist, because you had talent. You picked up an instrument, you painted, you wrote poetry, you acted, only to discover that a million other people with exactly the same amount of talent as you (and uncannily similar ideas as yours) were competing for the same single spot open to the masses. If you didn’t somehow find a way to cheat, you didn’t win. Nobody who plays by the rules will make it.
Disillusioned, you turned to crime. But even that is overcrowded! Everyone and their uncle is doing something illegal, the cops are the worst criminals of all, and the jails are so crammed full that most of the time they won’t lock people up anymore because there is no room. In fact, in an ironic twist, there are criminals competing to get into prison, because it feeds you, clothes you, houses you, and keeps you away from living with your parents. And with modern humanitarian laws, prisons are nicer than most ghettos.
So what do you do? We have the luxury in this glut of wasted human lives to collect rarities. We only want Eskimos and child prodigies. Anything else is surplus. Back when I was a child artist they told me; use it or lose it. Take all the opportunities you can now to build yourself a resumé, because when you get older, they won’t want you anymore. I thought that was crazy; after all, they wanted me for my art, and I would only get better with time, right? No. They wanted me for my age. My art did improve as I moved through my 20’s into my 30’s, but now nobody will take me. They aren’t looking for talent. Just novelty.
There is one place left in this world where a tiny speck of decency remains: the rich and elite are born with it all, and they keep it all, because rich children’s parents will use contacts to make a life for their kids. The rich still live in a ‘village’ mentality — they still network. There is still a remnant of the concepts of honor, trust, and reliability in the elite circles. They will help one another, they will hire one another’s kids, and they will plan for the future of their children. And this is all a good thing.
The money and the opportunities and the best spots on the earth are reserved; not for the poor and those outside the ‘society’, but only for those few and meager persons within. But because there are so few elite children for a large amount of crème jobs, this virtually guarantees that all the top positions on the earth will be filled with idiots, while the really talented people among the seething masses will be trampled down and starved to death, never having been offered a single chance.
Why? Because of fear. Because the rich see how desperate and mean the seeing masses are getting in their constant, vicious forced competition, and they are afraid of letting a wild beast like that into their genteel domain. What if he murdered someone? Better to give the job to Johnny who can barely hold a pencil than risk hearing that battered old allycat cuss at the dinner table or something.
So here you sit; poor, out of work because your resumé isn’t spectacular enough and you’re not an Eskimo (in fact you’re probably white, shame on you), dumped because you didn’t matter to your former fiancée, a washed-out artist because your talent isn’t flashy enough to out-compete a million others, ignoring your parents who only come around when they feel bad and want you to stroke them, with no friends because they can all find cooler people to be with. And to top it all off, you’re too stubborn to commit suicide, because you know to your heart this is not the way it’s supposed to be. You know something can change, something has to change, and something will change.
But what?
This is the situation millions of young Americans wake up to every single morning, and their parents wonder why they are always depressed. Parents who, themselves, grew up in a world where the idea of showing a child that you need and want him was at least still the cultural norm.
We have nothing. We devalue ourselves, because we are not valued by anyone around us. We all feel that we are useless, worthless, trash, because that is what our entire lives keep telling us. We watch the movies and we feel sick to the core of our being in a way that we often cannot explain. Those movies are all reminiscing about the 60’s and 70’s, sometimes the 50’s, decades that we neither remember nor want to remember. The movies were made by ‘them’ for ‘them’, and all the movies laugh triumphantly about their freedom from responsibility; how by not needing nor wanting their children, by having endless recreational sex without responsibility, the elder generations cut themselves free.
But their own foolishness will destroy them. Because they have just created sixty million really, really angry people.
“They” tell us to grow up and be a man or woman; tough it out. Make it on your own. Go out and hack out a place in this jungle. But they are telling us to do what they themselves were never forced to do; they grew up in a world where the elder generation looked after the younger, or at least pretended to. They know not of what they speak. They have no idea that by forcing their children to do something inhumanly hard, something they themselves never had to do, we are in fact becoming much, much stronger than them… and ready to explode.
They built a human timebomb. No one ever ‘gets away with’ anything, there is always a consequence; and the longer it is delayed, the bigger the explosion will be. The rebellion of the 60’s — the results of the introduction of the birth control pill and condom — didn’t just fade away. It is here, inside us, inside sixty million children who are just about at the end of our human endurance and patience.
Oh, we’ve tried. We wanted to be accepted and loved. We thought that if we obeyed and did what we were supposed to, that they would suddenly realize they needed and wanted us. But they think they can keep us down by running us endlessly through the same old routine: go get a job, hack it out for yourself, make yourself a place, stop whining, stop clinging, get away from me and go… just go. Go to the other side of the planet where I don’t have to know you exist. Go somewhere else and be as happy as I think I am, as free and irresponsible as I have been, somewhere that I don’t know about.
It has been a carnival of sorts… a wild ride for forty years. They are all turning sixty plus now, the power suits, the business owners, the leaders and politicians, the last of the baby boomers who set up the revolution for their younger siblings and helped them along. Their lives have been full and good, free from shame, free from anything but selfish ambition and pursuit of hedonism. They cut off their relatives, they cut off their parents and children, and now they own the world. Everything is all about them.
But what they are ignoring will quietly simmer until one day the pressure gets just a little too high…
All Generation X — the generation of nothing — has left is to destroy the world that doesn’t have any room for us; because when 60+ million Americans are all not needed nor wanted, it’s not just us. It’s Them.
Fight Club was a movie entirely centered around this problem. The ‘younger’ Generation X, those about 39 years old and younger, are not needed by anyone; no one looks up to any of us, nobody needs us or gives us any real love. Nobody even wants us around.
We take up too much space. We use too much air. We make too much trash, we eat too much food, we want too much attention. We make too much pollution. We are overcrowding the earth with too many unwanted people. All of these paranoias — most of which are actually scientifically not true — are just a symptom of the real problem: Them.
But who is ‘Them’?
My generation uses that word, capitalized, as if describing the very devil. We whisper it, we put emphasis on it: “THEM”. My parents used to ask me: who are ‘they’?
‘They’ are the elder generation, the group that includes every mature adult above us who should have wanted us, should have needed us, should have brought us into the world with delight and done everything in their power to create for us a life, and then live that life alongside us. ‘They’ are the larger archetype of our parents and grandparents and village elders, the ones who should have been the most supportive, the most delighted in us, but were in fact the most remote. ‘They’ are the elder generations who control every institute of man under which we are oppressed.
‘They’ are the betrayers of Man.
The world is too small for the selfish as long as anyone else exists in it. Our parents were often less than thrilled that we were born. How many of our parents actually sat down and planned their first pregnancy, then got pregnant on purpose? They were a child of the 60’s and 70’s when everyone just wanted to have sex… but no one wanted the children that came about because of it.
Every child born today is a survivor of a war that is destroying 1.37 million lives a year just in America (that is about 1 billion human beings in total, the total worldwide sum to date); every person of the X generation knows deep to their core that they could have been aborted. Instead, they were allowed to live; but there is a big difference between being allowed to live, and being wanted.
After that, your parents got bored of each other and divorced, and then you got tossed from one to the other like a hot potato, neither really wanting to keep you. Either that, or you got abandoned by one and dealt with by the other who is then reminded of the man she hates or the woman who left him every time that parent looked at you. Nobody wanted you. You were a mistake.
You went to Kindergarten. In school, you learned that the teacher — who had far too many kids crammed into his or her class and wasn’t being paid half of what they should have been — didn’t really want you to be there either. If the teacher had less students, they would have been a lot happier. You were surplus. Your school was not given enough money by the government (because the government officials embezzle 70% of all the finances that were supposed to go to the schools) to even feed you decent meals; you ate dog-food for lunch and you were told it was a four-square balanced diet.
You tried to find a mentor among your relatives and the friends of your parents, but learned pretty fast after a few painful experiences that they only wanted you around kind of like their pet dog: to amuse them. After they made you light the firecrackers because you didn’t know better, and you got your fingers and eyebrows burnt, or after your uncle got you drunk just to laugh as you stumbled around the room, you figured out that a mentor was never going to come into your life. Everyone is just out for themselves. It was kind of heartbreaking, but you moved on your lonely way.
For a while maybe you found acceptance among some peer-group, going to crazy lengths to be one of them, desperate because you had no other family and no one else to need or want you. You joined a gang, you took drugs, you learned to smoke, you had sex long before you were ready. You somehow survived your overcrowded High School years only to find out that as soon as High School was over and you were no longer a convenient two row’s away in English class, the friends that were so close could no longer be bothered to drive across town to see you. They had better things to do.
Determined to make it on your own, you decided to get a real education — because you knew that nobody without four degrees can actually get a job that pays anything — but discovered that the waiting lists to get in a good college are so long, they can pick and choose out of millions of prospective students, and dump all but the rarest gems. If you weren’t an A+++ student, or a full-blooded Eskimo, there was no room for you. And if you were white, forget it. America has too many white people. Only Burger King wants them.
So you dropped out of a Community College, which was overcrowded and underfunded, and got a job. But because there were 45 other people pounding on your boss’s door waving their resumés in the air, you had to kiss ass real good to stay employed. A little mean king on his little mean throne, your boss abused and mocked you every day you worked for him, until he finally fired you because he didn’t need you…
You got a girl or boyfriend, and for a moment you felt as if the world was finally right! Someone needed you! At last, for the very first time in your life, you had a focus, a center, a purpose to be living and breathing. You were thrilled beyond your ability to think. But after shopping around a little bit, your girl or boyfriend found about twenty other people they liked better than you, and dumped you for the next one. After all, there’s more fish in the sea.
You tried to become an artist, because you had talent. You picked up an instrument, you painted, you wrote poetry, you acted, only to discover that a million other people with exactly the same amount of talent as you (and uncannily similar ideas as yours) were competing for the same single spot open to the masses. If you didn’t somehow find a way to cheat, you didn’t win. Nobody who plays by the rules will make it.
Disillusioned, you turned to crime. But even that is overcrowded! Everyone and their uncle is doing something illegal, the cops are the worst criminals of all, and the jails are so crammed full that most of the time they won’t lock people up anymore because there is no room. In fact, in an ironic twist, there are criminals competing to get into prison, because it feeds you, clothes you, houses you, and keeps you away from living with your parents. And with modern humanitarian laws, prisons are nicer than most ghettos.
So what do you do? We have the luxury in this glut of wasted human lives to collect rarities. We only want Eskimos and child prodigies. Anything else is surplus. Back when I was a child artist they told me; use it or lose it. Take all the opportunities you can now to build yourself a resumé, because when you get older, they won’t want you anymore. I thought that was crazy; after all, they wanted me for my art, and I would only get better with time, right? No. They wanted me for my age. My art did improve as I moved through my 20’s into my 30’s, but now nobody will take me. They aren’t looking for talent. Just novelty.
There is one place left in this world where a tiny speck of decency remains: the rich and elite are born with it all, and they keep it all, because rich children’s parents will use contacts to make a life for their kids. The rich still live in a ‘village’ mentality — they still network. There is still a remnant of the concepts of honor, trust, and reliability in the elite circles. They will help one another, they will hire one another’s kids, and they will plan for the future of their children. And this is all a good thing.
The money and the opportunities and the best spots on the earth are reserved; not for the poor and those outside the ‘society’, but only for those few and meager persons within. But because there are so few elite children for a large amount of crème jobs, this virtually guarantees that all the top positions on the earth will be filled with idiots, while the really talented people among the seething masses will be trampled down and starved to death, never having been offered a single chance.
Why? Because of fear. Because the rich see how desperate and mean the seeing masses are getting in their constant, vicious forced competition, and they are afraid of letting a wild beast like that into their genteel domain. What if he murdered someone? Better to give the job to Johnny who can barely hold a pencil than risk hearing that battered old allycat cuss at the dinner table or something.
So here you sit; poor, out of work because your resumé isn’t spectacular enough and you’re not an Eskimo (in fact you’re probably white, shame on you), dumped because you didn’t matter to your former fiancée, a washed-out artist because your talent isn’t flashy enough to out-compete a million others, ignoring your parents who only come around when they feel bad and want you to stroke them, with no friends because they can all find cooler people to be with. And to top it all off, you’re too stubborn to commit suicide, because you know to your heart this is not the way it’s supposed to be. You know something can change, something has to change, and something will change.
But what?
This is the situation millions of young Americans wake up to every single morning, and their parents wonder why they are always depressed. Parents who, themselves, grew up in a world where the idea of showing a child that you need and want him was at least still the cultural norm.
We have nothing. We devalue ourselves, because we are not valued by anyone around us. We all feel that we are useless, worthless, trash, because that is what our entire lives keep telling us. We watch the movies and we feel sick to the core of our being in a way that we often cannot explain. Those movies are all reminiscing about the 60’s and 70’s, sometimes the 50’s, decades that we neither remember nor want to remember. The movies were made by ‘them’ for ‘them’, and all the movies laugh triumphantly about their freedom from responsibility; how by not needing nor wanting their children, by having endless recreational sex without responsibility, the elder generations cut themselves free.
But their own foolishness will destroy them. Because they have just created sixty million really, really angry people.
“They” tell us to grow up and be a man or woman; tough it out. Make it on your own. Go out and hack out a place in this jungle. But they are telling us to do what they themselves were never forced to do; they grew up in a world where the elder generation looked after the younger, or at least pretended to. They know not of what they speak. They have no idea that by forcing their children to do something inhumanly hard, something they themselves never had to do, we are in fact becoming much, much stronger than them… and ready to explode.
They built a human timebomb. No one ever ‘gets away with’ anything, there is always a consequence; and the longer it is delayed, the bigger the explosion will be. The rebellion of the 60’s — the results of the introduction of the birth control pill and condom — didn’t just fade away. It is here, inside us, inside sixty million children who are just about at the end of our human endurance and patience.
Oh, we’ve tried. We wanted to be accepted and loved. We thought that if we obeyed and did what we were supposed to, that they would suddenly realize they needed and wanted us. But they think they can keep us down by running us endlessly through the same old routine: go get a job, hack it out for yourself, make yourself a place, stop whining, stop clinging, get away from me and go… just go. Go to the other side of the planet where I don’t have to know you exist. Go somewhere else and be as happy as I think I am, as free and irresponsible as I have been, somewhere that I don’t know about.
It has been a carnival of sorts… a wild ride for forty years. They are all turning sixty plus now, the power suits, the business owners, the leaders and politicians, the last of the baby boomers who set up the revolution for their younger siblings and helped them along. Their lives have been full and good, free from shame, free from anything but selfish ambition and pursuit of hedonism. They cut off their relatives, they cut off their parents and children, and now they own the world. Everything is all about them.
But what they are ignoring will quietly simmer until one day the pressure gets just a little too high…
All Generation X — the generation of nothing — has left is to destroy the world that doesn’t have any room for us; because when 60+ million Americans are all not needed nor wanted, it’s not just us. It’s Them.
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