What Dreams Do Speak Of Things To Come. (1)
Part One: A Window of Yesterday and The Door To Tomorrow.
To the reader encountering my blog for the first time I can imagine that it would be a bit unclear about what the main topic is about.
What is the pattern? Where is it going, and to what point? What am I doing?
Stories and parables. That’s what I’m doing.
It’s a long story.
If you want to check on the orthodoxy and Catholicity of what I write, there are lots of resources you can use on your own time, and I take it as a compliment. You have what it takes to do all that work — I support you all the way!
We all should be studying everything as closely as we can. It pleases God, it deepens our understanding and leads to a stronger foundation of self governance to support our faith.
In the meantime, I will go on telling you a story.
***
Remember if you can, a time in your life when you wanted to do something that was not school, or work, or sports.
Television, the movies and games didn’t satisfy you either. It was such a beautiful day, early in the morning, and you lived in the most boring house in the most boring place in the world built by and filled with the most boring people ever.
You needed to go and do something, somewhere else, but you were stuck where you were, wondering what to do.
Unable to sit there anymore, you leave the boredom of your house and walk along the boring streets, not really looking where you were going, just trying to think of some way of relieving your boredom.
Imagine that without realizing it, you found a medieval city that seemed like it was built the same way as the walled city of Kowloon in the heart of Hong Kong (but without the crime lords, vice pits and gangs), and it was having a Medieval-styled Faire in it.
While you wandered around it, avoiding a group of bootleg dentists staring intently at your mouth, you catch a glimpse of me near the blacksmiths, sitting beside an old army style backpack, wearing a strange kind of hooded traveller’s cloak.
It’s a quiet corner near the back of the booths with the old books and hand woven clothing, and I am sitting near the knife-maker telling a story about something just long enough to hold everyone’s attention until the juggler’s mum can finish bandaging his burns.
The story is a kind of parable that people like to listen to, and reaches something inside of each listener in a way they are not used to anymore. It brings back faint memories in you, stirring them awake.
There is just barely enough quiet in that moment for everyone to hear it, and as soon as I finish it, an anxious woman whose name is almost always Sally will show up, clapping her hands above her head in a way that tries to compel people to applaud more loudly for some reason, before announcing the next event.
The strange feeling is broken like a spell. As people begin to draw closer to the next event, you try to move in closer to see me better.
I had been hard to see clearly where you were standing and listening, and as people began to mill around you, you lost sight of where I went.
You wander around the faire all day, taking in the sights and sounds. Later, when the day’s events have drawn to a close and the evening feast in the great hall is largely over, when the last of the troubadours has finished to great applause and the juggler’s mum drives her weary son, happy and in the first stages of shock to the local hospital, it will be time for conversations and storytelling.
You will catch sight of me again, as you settle into a place beside the woman called Sally.
You see me sitting near to the fire but hard to see, and you can hear me quite clearly now, telling a story about something that everyone who remained in the hall wants to hear to the very end.
Gradually, as the soothing effects of great food and good wine in friendly company take hold, I weave my words into a story that enfolds everyone in the hall, even Sally, who is sitting quietly beside you now, relaxed and happy, unguarded enough to reveal without triggering her constant reflexive anxiety that she is actually a sweet and deeply caring person.
It is a story about a world under a terrible curse, ruled by despots who use evil magic and sorcery to keep the people under an enchantment of terrible, diabolical power.
I take the greatest care to choose only the truest words and phrases, speaking into existence a story that is both a map and a kind of camouflaged history. The people in the audience must never know until the very end that the story is really about them.
The story is a very powerful counter-enchantment, an antidote of truth for the poisonous black magic of the sorcerers, but I have to administer it in exactly the right way, so as to avoid triggering the hidden spells and curses buried deeply into the listeners’ minds and hearts.
Just as with the ancient long tales told in the winter nights, I know that my work can not be told in one sitting. I draw my story to a close, and the listeners slowly, quietly stir and murmur.
I wait a while, as conversations drift around the hall, seeing that the intended effect was achieved, and another piece of the enchantment has lifted from a few more souls. I am satisfied that tonight as they go to their rest, healing dreams will once again mend the damage done. By the morning, many of the spells left in them will dissolve and break.
Many, but not all. The larger story is not yet finished, and there will be more parts to add to the weave in the evenings to come.
Before I rise from my place near the great hearth to seek my own rest, I engage in a quiet conversation with one or two of the others. Not everyone at this Faire is under the control of the evil sorcerers, and some have questions to ask about the latest part of the tale.
“Are you saying that Ratti – Pius XI —brought them together to control their knowledge, to teach them only what he wanted them to know?”
“I think it is possible. I think from what I have learned about Hume and Locke and their influence on him, that it’s quite probable.”
“But why? For what possible purpose would he have done that?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
I continued softly, “Suppose you were someone restless with power, drawn to Rome by the powers of Ratti and his promises of great skill and knowledge. You placed your name in his academy of sciences; with your trust in his skill, your absolute faith in his teachings, you did without question whatever he asked of you, and in return he channelled your own energies into powers you scarcely dreamed you had.
And then suppose, one day, somehow, you realized that this Pope, this sage-philosopher, whose mind could control yours so skillfully, was false to his teachings, false to you, false to every man, king, scholar, priest, that he had ever served.
What would you do if you found that he had dangerous plans and terrible purposes that you could not even guess at, and that the very foundations of his teachings were a lie? What would you do?”
The questioner was silent for a while, thinking. Then he said, “I would run. I would run until no one could find me.”
“And then I would begin to think.”
***
My intention throughout this blog is not disingenuity and confusion but clarity. The order and arrangements of the separate articles are not following a modern narrative style, but are arranged instead into a very old pattern not immediately familiar to the modern mind. Though altogether they will form a collection of thoughts and ideas into a clear, comprehensive and articulate whole when completed, they are not anchored to a specific purpose such as writing a dissertation or thesis.
Along the way, I am reintroducing to the adult reader ancient concepts and original word meanings into the modern English vocabulary so that the topics and problems I discuss, along with their solutions and answers are not only as true as I can tell them, but meaningful and relevant.
“A riddle is a tale so familiar you no longer see it; it’s simply there, like the air you breathe, the ancient names of Kings echoing in the corners of your house, the sunlight in the corner of your eye; until one day you look at it and something shapeless, voiceless in you opens a third eye and sees it as you have never seen it before.
Then you are left with the knowledge of the nameless question in you, and the tale that is no longer meaningless, but the one thing in the world that has meaning any more.”
---- Patricia McKillip
There are answers from our past, including our ancient past, which I found in hidden corners and places where Catholics seldom remember anymore to look.
And I feel very strongly that they need to be explained and used in the world of today by as many Christian people as can be reached. Much of what is going on in today’s world is very hard for people to understand. Knowledge seems to be failing at the same pace as education seems to be losing its value for people. There are riddles and conundrums everywhere.
Faith is being tested now as never before in the long, half-forgotten history of the human race.
The story woven into this blog is about two worlds existing at the same time on a single planet. Both worlds are coming to the end of an age, and are at the threshold of a new one. One world will die, and the other will be born. There are people living in both, but only the people that can live in the world about to be born will survive and thrive.
There are evidences that these changes are accelerating and increasing, and our human societies are undergoing dramatic changes to the point that there is no place left where a status quo exists.
Half-truths and outright falsehoods are harder to use to manipulate, dominate and control people with, are easier to identify by more and more people, and can only be used to conceal anything or anybody for very short periods of time, if they work at all.
The glamour which was once the universal adornment of the wealthy, the powerful and the famous has now worn off, its effects no longer universal, and the accustomed idolatry from other less powerful, wealthy and famous souls is now replaced with mockery and contempt. Authority, as it has been used and understood for five centuries is questioned always and everywhere.
You would think that the whole human race was waking up after a hundreds year-long sleep. It’s as if the world has been trapped in a strange enchantment, made with very old, very powerful forces once called magic, and now the enchantment is breaking, and the powerful forces that sustained it are weakening, fading. People are coming out from under its influence as from a strange, hypnotic trance, wondering what happened.
But the enchantment is not over yet. Many people – a majority -- are still enthralled to all or part of it, usually because they don’t even know it’s a form of magic, so old and so subtly laid upon them that almost nobody left in the western world remembers that it even is magic – and a very evil type, at that. It’s potency depends greatly upon the belief of its victims to sustain it, and ironically, it’s efficacy needs their ignorance of what it actually is.
It was done to us on purpose, of course.
Some of my American readers might be familiar with the word Chautauqua. This was an adult education and social improvement movement that was quite popular until about the 1920’s. It was a successor of the Lyceum movement, along the same lines of intention.
All your life, just like me, somebody has been trying to take something from you, and to keep something from you. There have been people who promise to give you something, and when you finally get it, you realize it’s not what they promised, not what you thought it would be, and doesn’t work for you like you thought it should.
If that sums up your experience with modern-day organized education, then you can thank the folks who started doing that to people like me and you with things like the Lyceum Movement and Chautauquas, the Royal Society and the Rhodes Scholarship.
I am not selling snake oil with stories that I tell; you’re free to believe them or not as you please.
Unlike the ulterior motives of the founders of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, there is no agenda to “improve” you or enchant you with the beautiful potentialities of a contra-deist paradigm.
But people no longer know how to use the old vocabulary of their language to defend themselves and to identify the threats to their person, their mind, and above all to their faith. Rhetoric is a word that is almost universally misunderstood by everyone, and most people would never consider it as a deadly weapon. Even among those who are aware of the old vocabulary, they have no idea how it could even be relevant to their present circumstances.
Instead, they use phrases from popular science fiction such as the Matrix movies, comics, familiar children’s stories like Alice in Wonderland or the Lord of the Rings to fill the verbiage gap wherever their modern comprehension of the English language leaves them without the right words. It helps to explain the problem, but not enough to clearly identify it or do anything beyond talking around it.
Or they go off the rails in other ways. In Traditional Catholicism, people can often go overboard to learn more and more of the rules, the rubrics, the theology, the Canon Law – until they walk and talk like a living Catholic Wikipedia. This legalistic approach of Catholicism is little more than a defense mechanism at first, but in time, it becomes dangerous because it replaces faith in God with faith in rules and law.
People want to go to church to encounter God, not walk into a courthouse full of lawyers. People want to have conversations with brothers and sisters in faith, not feel like they are in an interrogation room being examined by the Inquisitor General.
Both of these manifestations, and others like them, reveal that the people choosing them are still held very strongly under the influence of the enchantment, and point out the direction of the correct way to break the spell.
***
The first attempt at doing something like this to the human race was recorded in the Bible. Genesis 11 begins with the strange story of an attempt by men to make a city with a tower “that has its top reaching up into heaven.” The people who said this are not named. Instead, the story relates that their intention in building the city and the tower was to “make a name” for themselves, and not be scattered over the earth.
It is such a short passage in the long narrative of Genesis. The reader is lead to believe that such a tower made of bricks and bitumen tar is a foolish escapade. The writer intended this effect, desiring a cautionary tale, and highlighted the foolishness of the men and their attempt to usurp powers reserved to God alone.
God, however, seems to take it so seriously, that He comes down to earth from heaven. He deals with the matter easily, the language of the men is confused, and they are scattered over the earth anyway. The reader is left to contemplate the moral stricture, then the chapter goes into the genealogy of Shem.
There are other versions of that story found among different peoples in later times, but this version is now the most well known one, as Christianity travelled out over the earth. In the Middle Ages, the Scholars put their attention to this story, and left some surprising answers for us.
A late medieval Gaelic text called the Scholars Primer includes more information about the building of the Tower. Its chief overseer and architect, Nimrod, was using a kind of magic in an attempt to reach heaven. It was to be done with a manipulation of words, deeds, and works.
“Others say, however, that only nine materials were in the Tower, to wit:
Clay, water, wool, and blood,
Wood, lime, and flax thread of a full twist,
Acacias, bitumen with virtue,
The nine materials of Nimrod's Tower.
to wit, noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, and interjection are their names: Nomen, pronomen, verbum, adverbium, participium, conjunctio, interjectio.”
This, and other texts from the period piece together a picture of men coming together to create a work of magic, spirit and flesh — not for a tower in the traditional sense, but a kind of artificial, intelligent giant.
It was supposedly a kind of a Golem, an infernal automaton machine like Talos of ancient Crete, mentioned in the story of Jason and the Argonauts. Both were made in the image of the recently destroyed Nephilim, mentioned in Genesis 6, who were regarded as “heroes and men of renown (men of name).
The “name” they wanted to make for themselves was a form of binding spell which they hoped would raise a magic great enough to steal power from heaven, enough to challenge God Himself.
The city was built to house all the human beings on the earth at that time, who, enthralled under this powerful enchantment would be part of the building project whether they knew it or not, willingly or unwillingly. The idea came, not from Nimrod, or any human, but the devil himself.
The human ‘architects’ were promised immortality, eternal fame and immense wealth, and in return, would worship the devil instead of God.
These stories were a Post-Deluge record of the first slave state, the first collegial academy, and the first artificial idol. The scholars found the whole story out of dozens of accounts such as the Wicker man described by Caesar, a folk-memory recounting and re-creating this ancient deed in a ghastly form. The “Tower” they were trying to make -- the golem-automaton -- was made of living humans possessed by evil spirits, as gigantic as the Colossus of Rhodes.
Ensorcelled and enchanted with black magic and diabolical curses, many enthralled wills would act together as a singularity, under a single collective Name.
Abominable Destroyer. Unfettered Unity.
Sovereign Singularity.
Lawless One.
The racial memory of this horror has never really faded. The television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, produced by Gene Roddenberry featured recurring encounters with a collective singularity known as the Borg. If you ever wondered where Roddenberry came up with the idea …
In my own studies, I’ve found enough to satisfy myself that St Paul and St John were aware of this version of the story. There were a lot more complete records from the ancient world in the time they lived.
Regardless, if it was known well enough in the ancient Roman empire, then it was well within the bounds of probability that someone might want to try it one day…
The ancient story recalls that the first “Tower” was struck by lightning from heaven, and burned. It fell to the earth with a great crash, never to rise again. Destroyed by heavenly fire.
Time and again, over the long count of years any efforts to re-create it afterward were thwarted by God. Again and again, as empires rose and fell over the earth, someone would try again, only to fail. The multiple attempts at control from force of arms and tailor-made state sponsored or controlled religions over the centuries could never guarantee the necessary circumstances to recreate the Tower of Babel.
About 500 years ago, those in control of the emerging sovereign nation-states, the state-controlled religions and the national learning finally produced a new plan, one that worked with surprising efficacy.
Education was centralized outside of direct religious and parental control, with state approval and support.
The meanings of words in common usage were altered, and new concepts were introduced in the altered language patterns. Franchisement and specialization were permitted, and under controlled conditions even encouraged.
Gradually it was possible, after years of trial and error, to control masses of people more efficiently and make all required alterations to their societies through their education with strategic use of obfuscation, omission, suppression, diversion and tangential investigation methodology.
It could be funded through the state, the religious wing, and also the new territorial form of government: the Corporation.
The command and control centers were built in each country, one by one: the Royal Society in London, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the Académie des sciences in France. In time every sovereign state would have them.
With each victory, their progress advanced, and more people came under their influence.
Now you could hide the 22 final, terrifying equations of Sir James Clerk Maxwell, presenting just the three you wanted studied by engineers. You could transform natural philosophy into investigative branches of physical sciences, each one separated and specialized from each other producing good works and true discoveries, but firmly held under the controls set to promulgate overblown paradigms of unprovable theory, and they would never really know it, because they would never see it.
Alchemists could hide behind chemical engineering and physics with ease. Pharmacist is now a word with a very different meaning that everyone assumes is just a branch of medicine, including the sincerely dedicated people working in the industry who make medicine right alongside poisoners and sorcerers.
This ‘new order’ in the fallen world, scattered into so many apparently unrelated pieces, was not to gain territory, but Dominion. To become the ultimate empire, the ultimate Principality. Not to merely become the wealthiest, but win ultimate power — immortality in fact, and not only in Name.
The last fortified place to fall, encompassing the greatest threat to their plans and designs because it was the guardian and champion of the Way, the Truth and the Life, the bringer of Heaven to earth, was finally breached in 1922, and the final, most important academy was planted like a conqueror’s flag in the ruins of its greatest city, Rome, in 1936.
The victors had realized finally that their tinker-toy petty religious copies could never achieve the success of Catholicism, but this new victory meant that if Catholics could be taught to act and think like the other enslaved Christians in their tailer-made gnostic infested religions, then they would finally be caught under the enchantment, if not totally, then at least enough for the infernal machine’s satisfactory functionality.
For almost one hundred years, the effects of this surrender have been astounding. From the 1920’s, the materialism and relativity theory paradigms gradually became the basis of the Catholic world-view. The majority of Catholic clergy and laity in what is called the Novus Ordo Church imposed on us from the 1960’s are enthralled by this world-view to the underlying enchantment, whether they know it or not.
The effect is stronger when Catholics fall out of the practice of Catholicism, but apostatized Catholics are necessary too, since they usually don’t even realize that they are apostatized due to the Strong Delusion that God curses them with.
But I know sincerely devoted Traditional Catholics who will argue with me until they’re blue in the face about Relativity and Dark Matter as if they were as true as Truth Himself. And for the Enemy, that’s very useful too.
“It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
That’s what I meant earlier when I said it was an enchantment that requires people to believe in it as strongly as possible, and to be as ignorant of what they give belief to as much as possible. Magic like this needs belief from human beings in order to manifest itself as real. Belief provides its substance, and its power works most strongly on people who actually do not know what it is.
Prestidigitation magic uses this to entertain us on the stage: the magician knows that “one thing” about the trick that you don’t. So to you, it looks like a woman really is sawn in half, a bird appears out of thin air.
Other forms of magic use it too. Enchantment uses repetition and emotional frenzy, or repetition and hypnosis to achieve the same effect. Put to music, the enchantment’s power is boosted threefold.
Enchantment uses popular songs, lectures, news reports, speeches from leaders and pundits, professors and teachers the same way, but with the intention to manipulate, dominate and control us in a way that distracts, confuses and misleads us...
It skews everybody’s perceptions of today’s problems. It hurts people with real spiritual and mental wounds.
The idea did not die. Though the “tower” was destroyed, the idea of it, and the knowledge of its making continued to haunt the imagination of mankind. The evil spirits that inspired and instigated it did not leave the earth, but endured.
United under the will of the Devil, the evil spirits promoted a mythos to the scattered peoples of the earth under their dominion, and in a short time, what we know of today as the fallen world came into being everywhere.
“There was a woman of Herun, a hill woman named Arya, who collected animals. One day she found a tiny black beast she couldn’t name. She brought it into her house, fed it, cared for it. And it grew. And it grew. Until all her other animals fled from the house, and it lived alone with her, dark, enormous, nameless, stalking her from room to room while she lived in terror, unfree, not knowing what to do with it, not daring to challenge it—”
“She died of fear.”
“And the animal? What was it?”
“No one knew. It wailed for seven days and seven nights at her grave, in a voice so full of love and grief that no one who heard it could sleep or eat. And then it died, too.”
----- Patricia McKillip, The Riddlemaster of Hed
As I was writing the original article about this story, I was commenting on an article from a better known Catholic blogger – let’s call him “Steve” for anonymity – and the subject of discussion was about why all our institutions and their underlying paradigms are breaking down, why people today are getting so tribal, and does it do more harm than good?
This conversation is from “Steve’s” essay:
“I am [in] no way an expert, although like yourself, the subject interests me a lot. I wonder if perhaps the breakdown of discourse is largely due to an underlying problem that is growing throughout the sciences: the functionality of dialectic itself as a means to discern, discuss and share truth in dialogue.”
“Steve”: “Would you be willing to explain that a little more?”
“Alright… The main thrust of this essay is tribalism. Let's start with that. Here's what I see about the opposing "tribes" : Rationalists, atheists, and materialists, with the Chief-Thains (i.e., the ones with the most money, and the biggest clubs) the Transhumanists and the Eugenicists.”
“Trace all their philosophical roots to their beginnings. You encounter the beginning of the clash between two opposing paradigms -- back to the ancient dispute between Plato who believed in the immortality of the soul [see: Phaedo and Meno] vs Aristotle who asserted that human beings were nothing more than blank slates to be written upon by a hereditary master class [see: Politics].”
“All the Rationalists, Materialists and Humanists, Transhumanists and Eugenicists stop there, and dare go no further. These two opposing paradigms have clashed and warred from the 17th and 18th centuries to present day. Gottfried Leibniz versus Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, John Locke, et al. After them we get sickos like Malthus and Darwin, and on and on, until here we are in present day circumstances, looking at how every scientific discipline is rotting under anti-scientific corruption from within because of these people and their dominant views.”
“These two paradigms are still fighting it out in the original, perpetual balance of power war, and dare not ever stop.
Why?
Because they dare never go any further into the past beyond Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. If they did, they would discover that what they call rationality is flawed, and fundamentally wrong.
Beyond the ancient Greek founders of Classical Reason, the basis of our modern systems of rational thought, were other, more ancient truth seekers in the era of mythology. These people understood that truth could not be unknowable, or at best, only relative. The whole point of all the mythologies of the ancient world was about the pursuit of truth. The Ideal Human they wanted to be, or to return to depended on knowing truth.
Ultimately, on finding it, the discovery that no human being was capable of becoming perfect and immortal, not even with the help of the gods, was what spawned Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle in the first place.”
“The ancients were afraid. The gods were lying -- all of them. The logos that the ancient Greeks had produced from the mythos they were born into told them that the world they knew would ultimately diminish and die... Outside of the fallen, dying world and its mythos was chaos, and death. To go beyond it was to go insane, and die in disgrace and dishonor.”
“Later, Christianity arrived, and a new mythos was born. Out of it, a new logos preached and taught of a new world, an Ideal Human Who was Jesus, the Creator-God become Man. Everything the ancient peoples had hoped and searched for...”
“But by then, most of the ancient world was decaying into fatalism, narcissism and nihilism. Thanks to those philosophers, Pontius Pilate is asking Jesus, moments before the Crucifixion, 'What is truth?' His rhetorical question was the cynical cry of the entire age. Rome and its gods had no answer to it. Pilate didn't even realize that the Truth was standing right in front of him when he asked it…”
“Why did our institutions break down and become tribalized?” … No, it was not because of mass education, and their deteriorations were helped along by mass propaganda and brainwashing, but that was not its cause.
Literacy and education are not always the same thing, although many people assume so in a society where literacy is very widespread.”
“The institutions that are breaking down base their ideals in a fallible, mortal image of humanity. The ideal human of the modern world is not even close to the model of the (ultimately unachievable) beautiful, perfect and immortal human of the ancient world, no matter how many injections of Botox or vaccinations for Covid.
But that is where dialectics has got us to: some tribes are defending an inhumane, machinelike, processed monster of a system and its institutions, while other tribes who are still sane can only watch them lose their reason, their humanity, and ultimately their lives.”
“The institutions that are falling are doing so because they're based in lies, and refuse to give them up. Their ideals are finite, limited and not universal…”
“In the end, just like the fallible human beings that made them and operated them, they grow old, they become weaker, they lose the capacity to function, and ultimately they die. That's all they can do.”
“That's what the Greek truth seekers discovered thousands of years ago, and it's what the tribes in charge of things in this world are facing now. It's what Robert Pirsig and the Boomer generation were completely unequipped to face, and its partly why we are gathering into tribes.”
“What is really the chief reason the sane ones among us are organizing into tribes?
Work crews.
We are planning and organizing for the work ahead.
The world, its institutions and the paradigms they are based on are not going to die anymore. They are dying, and we are getting ready for it.
The sane ones that is…”
“It's what we are. It's what we do.”
***
In the book of Daniel, we read that he saw in the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar the image of a giant statue of a human made of gold, silver, bronze, iron and clay. A stone not cut by human hands struck the statue at the feet made of iron and clay, and the statue fell, shattered into pieces finer and lighter than the dust and chaff of a threshing floor. The wind carried it all away, and it was never seen again. The stone, which tradition says was a thunderstone, grew to the size of a mountain so big that it covered the whole earth.
It was such a terrifying dream to the king, that he was about to put every wise man, philosopher and priest to death if they could not divine it and give a truthful answer about its meaning. Later, the story tells us that the king went mad for seven years and lived like a wild beast as punishment from God for his pride. His pride was humbled, and his attempt to build it was defeated.
We are told that this is a prophetic dream about the coming of Jesus, who is the rejected stone of the builders of this fallen world. The stone is also His kingdom, that grows into a mountain covering the earth. A New Ideal Man, True, Beautiful, Perfect and Immortal, would come, and a new world would come into being to cover the earth. The statue represented, among other things, four kingdoms from the prophet Daniel’s time to ours that would attempt in one way or another to re-create Babel, and its “tower”. But ultimately, its image was fallible and mortal. It would die, and so would the world created in its image and likeness. King Nebuchadnezzar was represented by the statue’s golden head. It is fitting that God would send this head a prophetic dream, with a prophet to interpret its meaning for him, of the millennia to come. The chest and arms of silver were the representations of The Medes and Persians who rose after, and the thighs of bronze represented the empire of the Greeks.
The iron of the legs are the Roman empire, and the part iron, part clay of the lower legs and feet bring us to modern times.
Christians were told by Jesus and His Church that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. After the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the Church He founded would go out over the earth, as the old world passed. Within each of us -- individually and collectively, the “body” of the Church -- the seed of the new world would gestate and grow. When the time of gestation was fulfilled, Christ would return to the earth again from heaven.
We were told that the fallen world of the passions is produced from fallen man, and is not the planet earth, which is from God. Through fallen man’s faith in it, and his works based on that faith, the fallen world is projected onto planet earth and upon each person susceptible to it in a self perpetuating, generational fallen state.
But the often overlooked and forgotten part of God’s Salvific Plan is the reclamation and regeneration of the earth.
And from ancient times to ours, as the body of the logos grows, and the more truth that man discovers or learns, it gets harder and harder to live with lies, because more and more of them become too obvious to ignore.
The harder it gets to hide or ignore lies, the harder it is to believe them, and the less rational it is to believe that truth – all truth, any truth -- is relative. In every human life, sooner or later, a moment comes leading to a crisis point.
To stay in the old state of being requires turning into a sociopath. A common expression of the sociopathic state today, for instance, is fanaticism.
In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig said: ‘You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.’
Christians did not get thrown to the lions by mediocre, wishy-washy community leaders “appealing for calm”, but by sociopathic fanatics. The bread and circuses the Romans gave to “the people” was not intended for any “improvement of society”, but for the pacification of those very same sociopaths. The same is true today in our present time, whether it is in the Middle east or in America. It doesn’t stop the gnawing doubts, or the encroaching fears. They can’t. They never could. The fact that Christians are still being attacked everywhere on the earth by sociopaths today doesn’t invalidate the truth we live and proclaim, and the fact that we have always been outnumbered by the lie-worshipping fanatics and sociopaths right up to present day does not reduce the fear and doubts of those same fanatics, but only enlarges and strengthens them.
They cannot kill and bury the truth. It only grows stronger and spreads like a fire. The harder they try, the more it grows. All of the strength, power and wealth they pour into the illusory status quos they cling to is finite – when the strength is gone, and the wealth is gone, the power goes out. As their powerlessness grows, so do their fears…
But the trouble does not end there. A fallen human seeking to escape a fallen mythos that produces only an irrational logos is not well equipped to face what is beyond it.
Both the mythos and the logos of the fallen world have insisted since their beginnings that what is beyond them is only chaos and madness. To go outside the mythos and beyond the logos is to fall into pathos and entropy; in other words, to go insane and die.
Today, even though the fallen world is now going insane from the inside out, and even though it is now plain as day for all to see, for those who still choose to believe its so-called wisdom there is still nothing outside it except a quicker path to madness and death.
Be content, the world, its soothsayers, its priests and its gods say, with what you have now. Learn to compromise. Build a better fallen world, and if you cannot, then accept the inevitability of the entropy of all things. Forget about all that Christianity crap, get real! And accompany us. Nobody in the fallen world cares what you think and feel, especially if it’s something we can’t use or sell.
Yeah, I’ve heard that screed my whole life, and so have you. We’ve all had this lying shit thrown in our faces our whole lives, and we all know that the ones shovelling it have nothing to do with reality, because they’re not even in touch with it anymore. Reality itself is leaving the fallen world, and now is seated in the new one.
The current world, its mythos, its logos, its gods and its version of the Ideal Human is very elderly, spiritually sick and mentally feeble, and is now going to die very shortly. It was never going to be allowed to go on forever.
Psalm 82
1 God presides in the divine assembly; He renders judgment among the gods:
2 “How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked?
Selah
3 Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; uphold the rights of the afflicted and oppressed.
4 Rescue the weak and needy; save them from the hand of the wicked.
5 They do not know or understand; they wander in the darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
6 I have said, ‘You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High.’
7 But like mortals you will die, and like rulers you will fall.”
8 Arise, O God, judge the earth, for all the nations are Your inheritance.
He was not talking to human sons of Abraham. God was speaking to the Elohim, and called them gods, for that is what they were, and what they still claim to be. God had put some of them in charge of the nations of the gentiles to rule them, but they had betrayed Him after the fall of the Tower of Babel, and gone over to the camp of the Enemy.
Catholicism teaches and preaches of a new world to come that is knowable, reachable, understandable and rational. The Christian world is outside of the fallen world, but it is not pathos, and its believers and adherents are not insane.
It is more real than the fallen world could ever be and is forever out of the reach of the evil spirits, their willing victims, and their enablers.
It is not just a hologram, or an idea. Faith alone does not give it substance, nor only the combination of the faith and works of mankind. It’s reality is made also with God Himself leading, teaching and guiding it. The world of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is a mental, spiritual and physical state of being. The people fit to live in it are fast becoming the only sane ones left on the planet.
Everything I have posted on this blog from the very first article is about the theology and practical logos of people who “do” Christianity in the expectation and preparation of that new world, and then living in it.
The old world, its lies, and its institutional evil has lasted as long as it has because up until now, many good people living in it were keeping it alive by building, funding and caring for it without even realizing it.
It’s dying now, because a growing number of good people in the world realize at some level that they don’t want it anymore, and they are stopping the work, the funding, and the ‘caring and sharing’. What’s been happening in the last seven years all over the world is very reminiscent of what was going on all over the former USSR and Warsaw Pact countries right before they collapsed.
We used to joke about the Soviets that the state pretended to pay the workers, and the workers pretended to work. People living there stopped believing the lies, and stopped working to support or care for the lies anymore. When it reached a kind of critical point, the USSR died.
After the USSR was gone, we shifted that mockery to the Peoples Republic of China. Very fitting, really. The state pretends to pay the workers, and all they produce is cheap, easily breakable junk. When it reaches the critical point the USSR reached, Red China will die too.
It’s happening right now, all over the earth to every part of the fallen world, its false institutions, and its false paradigms.
Its vain attempt of a replacement for and mockery of the Holy Eucharist – money – is already failing. It’s not even pretending to be based on any physical value anymore, like gold, petroleum, or even the value of economic productivity. It’s based on the value of debt. Soon, it won’t even have that.
***
A storm is coming.
I feel it. The living things around me feel it too, wherever I go. I watch the creatures of God under my care and the wild things around me for signs of fear, but there is none. They are guarded and watchful, more than they used to be -- but not fearful. The changes happening to the earth, the waters and air seem to tell of its strength, its immanence.
A very big storm.
Like the one God came to earth in, long, long ago to destroy Babel and its tower, but bigger. The first one was like a spring rain in Israel – the former rain, is what it’s called there. Here a moment, then gone.
The coming one will be like the heavy storm heralding the second, heavier rains. The ones that come upon Israel suddenly at the harvest time.
Much, much bigger.
This time, it will come upon the whole earth.
This time, it won’t be a rain of water, it will be fire.
I’m not afraid of what’s coming, and you don’t have to be either. You do have be ready for it though. And that’s easy:
Stop believing lies. Let them go as soon as you discover them. Be loving. Be honest. Care.
Forgive.
And follow the Truth wherever He leads you.