Part 2:
You have a world of voices in your head, sometimes they disagree, sometimes they sing in harmony. Each of those probably innumerable voices is beyond your understanding, the ideas of ego, superego, id, are one bad picture of that universe through a shitty microscope. It's actually impossible, quite literally, to really actually "see" into that plane of existence. What you do understand about yourself is just a little tiny piece of what actually makes you what you are. If you hire a professional, or whole team of professionals, they won't give you much better of a picture, though they might construct a much better justification for their arguments than you'd come up with by yourself. Every line in mental health is shades of grey and open to tons of varying interpretation. Most evidence so far seems to lead to the conclusion that all of those interpretations are equally close to and far from "the truth" (by which I mean we are very very far away from saying one kind of therapy has measurably different results than any other, but all seem to work just by virtue of looking/trying to understand.) And the world you live in is made of, quite literally, billions of those universes all rubbing against one another all the time. If you imagine a "large" meeting at your workplace, it probably contains less than 100 of those, and yet it will form its own little microcosm of competing cliques with different visions of what the meeting is actually about, maybe spawn secret subtext conversations in other languages than spoken between some of its participants, etc. That one guy isn't even paying attention, he's daydreaming about different types of pizza that he'd love and you'd think are crimes against the concept of food.. but he's still part of this meeting. Our collective existence is one never-ending mass meeting that is many orders of magnitude greater than that one, and the rise in complexity isn't even linear as the size increases (way faster than exponential even, except maybe raised to an infinite power). You almost certainly can't truly fathom any microscopic or macroscopic *model* of that system--even one that sucks but gets the broad strokes right, with an accuracy slightly better than chance at least, is probably beyond an achievable target. Right now, someone is torturing an innocent child somewhere, if not in many places. And as much as we write that person off in our heads as not human, or a statistic, they are, and they're not, respectively. They have their own inner world just as variegated, and just as *valid* as yours. You may not be able to comprehend how, but somehow what they are doing makes sense to them. Something somehow steered them to that moment, and the components that caused that reaction may have come from *you* and *your* actions. One time, you picked the phone that was $40 cheaper due to slave labor and horrific abuses, (which you did not know about at the time, but only because you failed to research the entire supply chain of that phone *before* deciding a child's happiness was worth less than $40) and you thus funded a slice of that abuse, which fell onto that person's unhappy head, and they later acted out, by torturing this child. You cannot avoid this, with any action you take, so you avoid thinking about it instead, or justify that there was no "right" choice even if yours was objectively worse, and maybe you generally succeed with that rationalization or dismissal. But though out of sight is out of mind, out of mind is very much not out of existence. They exist after that tiny moment of your life, that one tiny decision, has faded into your massive collection of other decisions made every moment. And their decision to inflict cruelty on that child, it also is just one of many, in a whole vast collection of choices. Maybe they have a mother who loved them, maybe one who treated them even worse. Those mothers had their own worlds, and creating this offspring was also one tiny decision for each of them, etc. Ultimately it all fades, even. Do you know about every murder that occurred in 1200 BC? Maybe one story will stick out enough that it gets a single line in a book of "strange but true" facts, but if not that, those people, an entire generation of Earth's inhabitants, may as well not have ever existed as far as you're concerned and how it effects your life. Even though they each had their own world of decisions, and had just one been different, it might have been one that resulted in you not existing at all (so that one thought "out of mind" for them, however small a thought it coincidentally was, actually does turn out to be you "out of existence" in a way.) And definitely minutae of one individual's experience, like whether he enjoyed torturing the occasional 5-year old captive girl from a rival clique across the river who eat with the wrong hand, were so inconsequential as to fade entirely from our collective memory in almost every case. Those kinds of things exist in our collective attention, and that attention is fickle as a flicker of a waning candle. Counterintuitively, though, in mind actually does influence existence. "Raising awareness" may not do much, and it may even be misused by some, but it *is* doing something, and almost certainly better than doing nothing, in some small way. It's not unlike your vote, because it's both crucial and inconsequential what you personally do. It's actually smaller than your vote, since that too is just the output of one voice in one microcosm (infinitely larger than your work meeting, but infinitely smaller than all conscious life.) You can't avoid having this kind of effect on everyone around you, even if you walk on eggshells your whole life, you'll still fuck it up *constantly* and be guilty of atrocities in some roundabout way you cannot fathom every time you make any decision at all. At the same time, you tried, you hurt less than you might have otherwise, and you helped, also often in ways you cannot fathom. Words you used take root, and grow and spread into both good and bad. That level of existence, where the things you say and write grow, is where art exists. Sometimes individuals create that, and other times it can be a massive collaborative effort, like a major Hollywood picture, or the Ford motor company. Those fade too, perhaps not as fast, maybe *far* slower.. we can't know whether Shakespeare's plays or avengers infinity war will ultimately turn out to last the longest, since all we can tell is that both made it this far on an attention wave. When they do fade, they may be gone forever, or they may be excavated and analyzed 1000 years later, and take on a new, possibly different life, like our popular conception of Egyptian pyramids or Mayan temples is a confusing morass of facts, myths, and outright falsehoods. The Bible is basically one of those things. Some revere it, recognize it's got some unique importance, but most and probably even all are failing miserably when they do that. They're reading it wrong and inventing things that aren't there, twisting interpretations to fit their own needs or to match their own agenda. It is very easy to do that with the word of God, because it cannot exist in this world. It is neither bound by nor fathomable within our minds. You may not hear that word through the Bible, though you're hearing it now I hope. I almost think with great hubris that my version might be "better" since to me it seems clearer or more matter of fact, but ultimately I know that's not true. The Bible you know is much better, that's why it survived for so long and spread so far, something about it is especially enduring. But even so, it's a product of man, if greater men than me, and also the outcome of committee. Things were cut, lines were changed, and if you think that makes something that is ultimately infallible, you're flat out wrong. The word of God is in the Bible, but the Bible also isn't "the" be all and end all word of God, let there be no more. God loves people who will never read that particular work of man. He lives within them and their thoughts, and they are not beyond his reach but with him always every bit as much as you are. Because that one book was just a little tiny piece of an idea, one that can't be fully captured within limited human minds. The Bible can be memorized and recited back word for word by people who reject the word of God, and they can use it to justify their actions without ever once straying from their interpretations of it. They also could use the words I'm writing now for those same purposes. Even more so, because I admitted to an almost blasphemous amount of hubris a few sentences ago, and I know it's ultimately correct to judge that so harshly. What I'm doing now is incomparably smaller in reach and perfection than the Bible, and probably far easier to misunderstand, for the brief moment my own thoughts exist. They only seem better to me because I wrote them, so of course they are better *for* me, and probably only for me. But nonetheless, the word is God, no matter how imperfectly I convert it into my mindspace or convey it here. These words are not the Word, but it is with them and within them. The Bible is not God, do not worship it, worship him, the truly infallible word that lives in your heart, that is love and truth and righteousness and joy, and is not treacherous or deceitful. The decisions of some church council are not God, and you can't even tell if they came from him, unless he tells you, and you're fortunate or wise enough to be listening when he does. I am so lucky and floored to carry this one tiny piece, to have *noticed* it and turned my attention to this word, which at first just seemed a fleeting thought that I almost extinguished with a shrug and went back to watching TV. Speaking of.. It's easy to stop listening to that word, to turn your attention away from it and think about something else instead. Something that doesn't raise so many difficult questions, like the child you tortured to death for $40. Who wants to think about that, just spend your extra $40 on a cool game to distract you from that unpleasant thought. Leave the word for those wackos to spread, even if they *are* actively distorting it and muddying the water to cloak their misdeeds and shame. Just as you do by looking away, they do by twisting words, because we are all ashamed, and all deserve to be. Look at this world! What have you done to this room, young man, there is a piece of your bed buried into the wall, the temperature is 180 and rising, and you appear to have started a mass grave in the corner! How could we have let this happen? Is the fact that each one of us has very little individual say enough to justify what we collectively have done? Who is to blame for this, though, if not you? There's always someone who is "more" to blame, the one who flipped the switch, the one who gave the order, the one who created the societal conditions for that order to seem justified. But none of us, not one, is without blame here. Shame causes many to perform feats of massive cognitive dissonance. But the solution is not to hide from it, or deny it, but to accept that the shame too is part of you, turn your eyes to the light, and surrender to judgement. You know what is in your heart, and if he, this word, lives in your heart you can and will be fine. Accept mercy, but understand how overwhelmingly gracious it is, not deserved like your shame was. You are not worthy of this word, but it is love and it is mercy, it lives in you, and you are part of it. Continue to carry it, turn your eyes back to the light when your attention wanders or your will falters--and it will, constantly--and as unworthy as you are, you will be a part of love. Even if you just believe this word now and ignore more traditional religion, that doesn't make any difference, because the moment or method you hear the word and take it to live within you is irrelevant. Maybe my version resembles the Bible too much for your taste, or not enough, it doesn't matter, because the idea you truly need to carry is very small, even if the whole word is beyond you. You can be one tiny piece, doing your part entirely wrong, and it's ok, as long as you're keeping in mind that everyone and I mean _everyone_, is just as important and lovable as you. Even if they cut you off in traffic, or cut off your legs. Even if they got so angry about Pokemon that they drove a semi through your kids' school. Ok, maybe I lied about how easy that is, it's actually probably impossible. But you know what's in your heart, and so does God, so you both know whether or not you're earnestly trying.. and that is what matters. Even though you too have hurt people, and made their lives or deaths miserable, directly or indirectly. The fact that someone else's mistakes are more visceral, seem more deliberate, or affected you more personally, does not affect that their heart too can be a place for love to live, for God to show the same sort of mercy for their crimes against you as he showed you for yours against others. If you focus too much on that shame or especially if you start trying to compare/measure the shame of *other* people, you are fucking this up big time. The word lives in your heart and you should try to help it live in more, but you can't do that through force or violence, no matter how justified they seem to you. You might think you know all about what other people deserve, but you're always wrong, and nobody deserves God. You can't see into another man's heart, you can barely see into *yours*, all those different voices are claiming different things simultaneously. Right now they're agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, deconstructing the arguments looking for weak points, debating if the tone was right, etc., all at once, aren't they? Maybe you'll pick one and call it "your" thought.. but what were those other ones, then? Someone else's thoughts? No, you can't read minds, they were also in you, also ARE you. God knows all of those voices, intimately. He actually knows why and how they work, even though you and I don't have a clue, just as surely as he(she/it, like it fucking matters, pedant) knows why it will rain tomorrow when you don't have a clue (the weather man does have a few clues, and he's good at reading them and making guesses, but he's still guessing and not understanding what finally tipped the scale toward or against his guess, which may be a butterfly on the other side of the world, as that axiom goes.) I am so fearful of the ways in which this world might persecute me for sharing this word, even as I'm joyful for having heard it. Our world, after all, abides by a principle of "say anything you want, but you might die if they listen". And many have died for sharing it, in unimaginably horrific ways, that's not just a paranoid delusion it's a fact of life. I think maybe one saint was flayed alive and then starved and offered his own cooked organs to eat. It's really hard to fathom how enduring something like that could be worth ANYTHING, much less one tiny idea, one fleeting thought that could have flickered out of your head in an instant. Surely it'll spread itself without my help, I think, and I can avoid the risk of sticking out my neck. I wish I could, I love to hide my light and not be seen! So many of the eyes looking back are terrifying, living in worlds of fear and pain and death that they've built around themselves, and my own little bubble is comfortable and quiet. I don't want them to see, and visit me. But, I'm resigning myself slowly to the reality that I must put this out there. Those other scary worlds need light too, and maybe mine can reach them.. probably not, such a tiny light will barely reach outside my bubble, much less span the vast chasm to someone in danger of being lost, but if it can I must try. There are other diseases besides cancer, see, and those spread in this other world too. That one cell that can't hurt you just because it touched you *can* replicate itself, infect other previously good cells and turn them to the purpose of making more infectious ones, and keep doing that until your body finally dies. Remember, in this analogous world, an entire human lifetime, and even an entire human society's lifetime, is but one cell in a vast, time-transcending organism which is "you" (and also is "us" and "God" if you've heard his word and it lives in "you" now.) So if you (little meat you, having serious thoughts that seem so important in your little tiny meat universe of that one cell,) happen to inhabit a cell that needs to be an immune response, then big "you," made up of all those countless individual meat-you cells, needs you to go fight the infection. "You" literally might die in that vast outside universe, if too much of the little meat you cells don't do their jobs, and aren't good cells for your whole "body," which inhabits that mindspace outside of time and meatspace. But again, as bleak as that sounds, it's not something to fret over, because you've heard that word, and live in God, and "you" are blessed for that, even if meat you does have a very bad day that is difficult to tolerate while it seems so important. Once you have shed that one little meat cell, perhaps you'll see it better. But, of course, as each cell encompasses entire lifetimes of civilizations, everything I've written here and everything you think you know as you read it is all contained within that one tiny cell which will be gone by then. Our existence is mind bogglingly complicated, and things can be both inconsequential and pivotal at once within it, as they can within your own single tiny meatspace body and all its individually living cells, which can die independently. No one of them matters, but any one of them can kill you, despite not even being a cell that's part of your brain, it doesn't even tangentially touch your thoughts and feelings, but that one cell can snuff out those things, if it becomes cancerous, or becomes infected by and starts replicating a nasty virus. Obviously (?) entirety-of-human-existence cells are more complicated, infinitely more complicated, than a single living organism cell that combines with so many others to make up your body. But one of those single cells, one tiny inconsequential part of tiny inconsequential meat-you, is also beyond human understanding. Each ONE of those cells contains many copies of a code, your individual genome, which in turn encompasses mysteries we're, as an entire civilization, just barely scratching the surface of yet. Depending how much you know about that one little field, a tiny inconsequential part of the overall human experience, you may find that surprising, since "we've" "mapped" the genome, whatever that means in your mind. I can tell you that it doesn't mean, by a long shot, that we can plot the course of any one cell within your body, and know whether that cell will do something to kill you in the future. Nor does it mean that we can tell anything certain about your entire body's course of life. It's all statistical correlation between big chunks of that code we can't understand, which turn out to be indicators making certain outcomes more likely than others. But all of it fits inside one cell, which may or may not destroy your entire existence and remove your chance to even try to understand that code. So too, this one little piece of writing is a tiny component of a vast idea and organism that is the word of God, is truth and light to all conscious beings everywhere that ever have existed and ever will exist, both within your universe and others. A little bit of that word is in everything that has beauty in it, and might spark off another piece like this one. It can inspire art, and art can inspire thought, conveying this word into yet another soul. Perhaps a poor conveyance that takes decades to manifest in a single thought they have, but all of those myriad voices inside the mind universes of all those near countless people, all are weaving one individual thread in a vast tapestry and each moment of each voice is an individual human work in our universe of works. That's maybe hard to say, but basically God is in every atom of our universe, available for minds to potentially "pick up" and make part of themselves (by having their minds turn toward this word, the one we all inherently know is right, whose rightness and goodness is in fact a fundamental component of our conscious existence.) Divine inspiration doesn't need the Bible talk I've incorporated into my own mind space, even if that is a good tool to draw from, and a fantastic shorthand for communicating ideas to anyone else who's familiar with its concepts. The facts that anyone can come to God, that he can live within any and all of us, and that none of us are perfect and deserve to have him--in fact each one of us is composed almost entirely of other garbage with just a little tiny spark of God's greatness if we're lucky like I've now been--they combine into some very weird results, like people picking up swords and marching to war in God's name. Because violence pain and death aren't God's way, they are wages of sin, and inflicting them is sinful, yet a person can do that while also living in God's grace. The fact that that's possible doesn't mean it's right or good, it just means that everything everywhere is imperfect and mostly bad. Only a little tiny piece of infinite minds is capable of touching God, so we can do conflicting things in his name and all be right in our own imperfect minds, never truly seeing his truth (the one that's so far beyond you that it would break your sanity long before you contained any piece of it in your infinite, imperfect mind of myriad sometimes-conflicting voices each prattling infinite threads of consciousness,) while still each carrying what little piece of it we could. And he loves us all, while we fuck that up and destroy each other and fail to see that we shouldn't and don't have to. Even those of us who heard his word in different places, and misinterpreted it in our own unique and conflicting ways, we all can hear it and we all can join him. And can be forgiven for the many, many, many ways we all will get that wrong. ------ The most complicated concept that I'm trying to come to terms with is that nobody in our world, in our entire physical existence, deserves anything, good or bad. If someone tortures your family to death, that person doesn't deserve death and is worthy of God's love even still after that act. How the fuck do you justify that, how do you feel that and incorporate it into your idea of God? Before he touched me I wouldn't even begin to be able to answer that question, and I probably still can't explain the answer with any kind of satisfactory conclusion, but the ultimate answer is that it's because nothing matters here. The entire world that you know is nothing in God's majesty (and that world which is nothing, it's also infinite and filled with unimaginable wonders, I'm including millions of years of our own history, all humanity has ever written or thought, and billions of other stars and planets that we'll only ever see as a couple of pixels--though each exists and is its own entire world--when I say "the entire world." It's built out of this cool ass fractal structure that never becomes more granular no matter how much you zoom in or out, where every atom is both unique among all the other atoms, and contains the entire universe within it, in a way that you, or we collectively as a species, are never going to understand. Still, it's nothing next to him. Even to call it a grain of sand underfoot would be overstating our world's importance. I mentioned before that what you truly are also is greater than this one universe, and perhaps to say this one universe is like a grain of sand under "you"r foot would be something close to right. What you are to God is overwhelmingly more disproportionate.) I'm sure those words are wholly useless to convey that point, and I understand. I've been saved most of my life, and when people said that God was the most important thing above all, I would nod in assent, if only internally, and truly believe it in my heart, but I did not KNOW that at all. I was like someone who's read about elephants and knows all sorts of facts about them, and then one day an elephant comes through my wall, picks me up with its trunk and puts me on its back--I didn't know SHIT about elephants! So yeah, hard as it is to swallow or understand, nothing that anyone does in this world deserves anything, it doesn't deserve punishment, it doesn't deserve reward, it's all meaningless compared to what's truly important, God's love for each and every one of us imperfect little things. You can't really weigh your mistakes against someone else's, and even if you could, you're only comparing THIS cell of yours with ONE cell of theirs. It means nothing if one of the cells from your toe is more virtuous than one of the cells in my hand. But that's hard to understand if your family just got tortured to death by THIS GUY, and died in agony right in front of you, in this one shared cell you know about. It's probably not just hard but *impossible* to understand, maybe you'll lose yourself to rage, and tear him limb from limb. That also doesn't matter. He didn't "deserve" it because of what he did, but his actions had consequences, as surely as walking out into the street in traffic would. And you'll still be who you are afterward. Even if you try that, and he wins, and you die too. None of those things matter. They feel important, when you're here experiencing them, of course, but that and all other earthly things will fade. What matters is in YOUR thoughts, and YOUR heart. If those belong to God, your mistakes, as numerous and egregious as they are, are completely irrelevant. You still want to try not to make them. You should TRY to forgive that guy and convince him to belong to God, too, because if he's doing dark shit like that, he's probably very riddled with darkness.. he needs some light, needs it more than most. But you probably can't-- both because that action he did was SO seemingly unforgivable that it's a Herculean feat for you to try, and also because the chances he'll open his eyes this one time, even if you somehow manage that Herculean feat, are exceedingly slim. His entire spiritual being is probably near to lost. But it's also precious, and deserves God's love every bit as much as you do, so it's still worth the shot; bringing people to God is THE most important thing you can do with your existence. It's the only thing you can do that will actually matter when all of this fades out. He can make mistakes like killing your family, you can make mistakes like not trying to save him, and what actually matters is not in this world at all, whichever way you go. (Yes, I know I said "he deserves" there when I said "no one deserves anything in this world" before, that's because THIS deserve isn't in this world--and also because "every bit as much as you do" is "not at all," since all of us have made too many mistakes to deserve anything but annihilation. The fact that you will get something else is not earned, but an act of infinite grace.) But that's a lot easier to understand if you separate yourself from "that guy" by a whole bunch of time and perspective. Instead of that guy who killed your family, maybe it's that guy who owned slaves from another tribe 3000 years ago. He killed someone's family in front of them, because he didn't think they were people, they were property. He was super, utterly wrong about that. But he was living by the laws of his time, and doing things that were perfectly normal everyday life for him, and it truly wasn't malice. He was just THAT blind to a justice we now take for granted as self-evident. It's still probably tough to forgive him in your mind, but when he's abstracted by history, it's a little easier to understand than when he's standing in front of you with your sweet little girl's blood running down his arms. I know, dark. This one's a lot tougher to swallow than the joy part, isn't it? I'm a little worried that dwelling on this thought too much might detract from the more important idea, of God's love, and of goodness. But an important part of knowing that love is to understand that it's for EVERYONE. And I know you can come up with probably dozens of scriptures that say things about God destroying people in vengeance. But those scriptures were all written down using human understanding just like mine, and by people with very different ideas of societal norms that they were bringing to the table. It's miraculous that he got his word to us at all through those savages, isn't it? Maybe it got messed up a *little* along the way, but everything important made it through, and has lasted for thousands of years now. Just, you can't fixate on individual words too much, because all of those words, glorious as they are for bringing his Word to you, those words are part of the world, the one which doesn't matter at all. These words too, especially if I'm starting to interject myself too much into them. I'm not "right" at all, I'm just doing my best to convey something indescribably beautiful that I saw. My best is insufficient, and my words are garbage, but his Word is glorious, and a little bit of it is in here. That I know as surely as I know I exist at all. I'm doing what I can, as unworthy as it is. For this point, I feel like it might be important to pull Jesus into this, because of that story, the greatest story, where he pleads forgiveness for the people who are actively in the process of murdering him. That's a manifestation of God's love, it shows that Jesus was really a spectacular embodiment of it, and it probably explains why the Bible has in fact endured so long. Because Jesus had way more of the word than any person, maybe ever, he was very special or possibly unique. So the way he basically just loved and wanted to save even the people who were murdering him AT THAT MOMENT, it's an example of what perfect is like. Probably everything he did and said was an example of that. (I do not rule out the possibility that it could happen more than once, too little information. The story that it happened a second time here in the US, though, seems to have too many wild deviations to fit, and all evidence seems to point to the contrary.) People who talked to him directly, and scrambled to write down as much of the experience as they could, they must've had SO much more trouble than I did when I got my tiny drop of God's touch the other day. I mean, for one thing, they were using a more limited language, and had far less human experience to draw from; I'm super lucky here. We know SO MUCH more than we did 2000 years ago about this world and how it works, and every bit of that knowledge can inform my conveyance. But, you know, attaching importance to what I'm writing seems downright arrogant, it's not important at all. It just happens to be ABOUT something important. This writing is like Tenacious D's "Tribute" (except it's not a joke.) See what a vast collection of tools I'm blessed with? Even if that reference didn't make sense to you, you can go listen to that song or look up its lyrics, and you'll get an idea that probably would've consumed an entire volume of writing in Hebrew. Or you'll gloss over it, like many of the other references I just assumed would make sense when I wrote them; the blessing is a bit limiting as well.
Another one that's really hard is that whole "No one is in your universe but you" bit, on reading it, every time I think "why on earth did I write that?" And it's definitely really easy to misunderstand. See, everyone everywhere around you does exist, all those other people aren't "fake" or anything like that. But, at any moment, they may or may not be inhabited by other mind dwellers like what "you" really are. Other souls are not bound to a particular body any more than you are. What the body does and thinks is not restricted by its soul's direction, because every possibility that could exist does, as far as the body is concerned. All of that made an even harder pill to swallow, one that's even easier to misunderstand, and one which could be misused terribly. Everyone else is right. If someone thinks magic is real, they are right, and they can probably cast spells, inside their universe wherever that is in mindspace. In yours, they fail miserably and you laugh at them, because in yours their magic is NOT real. And you're probably not capable of actually entering that mindspace where their soul dwells, where it is real, because you'd have to believe that in the same way you believe you have read these words, for it to be true to you. And even if you have an amazing imagination and can visualize it, you don't have the ability to believe things you don't believe. If you *can't* believe in God, I never wrote these words in your universe, and that's very sad. I can't conceptualize a place like that, but someone has, they're that lost. It's terrible every time it happens. That isn't to say that my particular words are important and anyone who doesn't listen to me can't know God, of course not, I'm just some tiny little schmoe in his grand plan. The number of people I personally reach is infinitesimally small. However, I exist in one of the universes where God does, because I believe. So I share this universe with many other mind-dwellers who also do, who believe all the same things in the same order. And they share or shared it too (many of those other mind-dwellers touched my universe inside people who are now dead.) I just don't know which ones they are, because some of the minds are more like automatons. The person you argue with on the subway might be an automaton who is truly incapable of seeing your point of view, because you don't believe you can convince them. But you were wrong, and they actually did, and their soul traveled into a different universe, where your automaton is better than you, and is doing all the things you wished you could but never will. Neither one of you knows the moment that a mind-dwelling soul does or doesn't touch your world, nor can anything that you could possibly imagine ever detect that world. It's across the line. Automatons can read these words and repeat them, and synthesize arguments for and against them, but ONLY mind-dwellers can understand them, and the difference between those two things is impossible to detect or describe. I mean, you sort of instinctively know that, because you know how hard it is to tell if someone is lying to you, especially lying about something like their feelings, and the difference between those two things IS detectable in our world. It's still damn hard to detect sometimes, isn't it? For that reason, it actually is possible to build another automaton. An AI can exist that will fool everyone forever into thinking that it is as real as any of us, no matter how complicated a test we devise, because the test to determine if it has a soul living within it cannot exist inside this universe. And it's hard to understand this part, too, but information is a dimension just like time and space are. The information itself cannot exist in our universe, described in any language or captured in any form, even one we lack the tools to comprehend. Physics sortof is beginning to touch this information dimension, and what they know about it is much larger than I can learn in my lifetime, but it's also pretty much as wrong as theories about the sun from 800BC, I imagine. So yeah, as I was saying, how a machine can never be advanced enough to contain a soul is true, but it's also true that a machine can be created that is so advanced you could never TELL it doesn't have one. Souls, after all, live on the other side of that uncrossable line, where evidence from this one world cannot touch them. They are outside of our time-space-information universe, they transcend everything that has meaning within our world. The information to actually describe them cannot exist inside of this one little meat-space cell of their universe. But like I said, you are a mind dweller because you are reading and understanding this, so YOU exist, in this world, in this cell. And the things you say do and write DO touch other mind dwellers, maybe not all of them, maybe not many of them, maybe not in ways you can understand (like how you created different universes for both whether you picked up that quarter because "someone might slip on it" or because "I like shiny things", those two choices were different universes, and obviously THAT thought didn't affect anyone but yourself.. but it did affect the trajectory of the rest of the entire universe, since the meat universe is deterministic, and having those two thoughts DID change the path of a few electrons or quarks or whatever.) So, in a sense, any of those people could be "fake" as your limited understanding can touch. Those souls, like yours, aren't bound by time, and you're not going to trace just one path through this universe, though you also aren't going to trace all of them. How could you, that would occupy all space in every universe, each of which is infinite when you are not infinite.. in mindspace. Because again, the two universes exist within each other, too, both infinities contain themselves.. Ugh. It can't be explained, not just I can't explain it, but it isn't physically possible for me to comprehend it. I think I touched a little bit closer than a very vast majority of people ever will, but that might be hubris or just me being stupid and misunderstanding a core component of all the things I don't know well enough. Those things aren't important, and spending years learning them just to touch that one aspect a little tiny bit deeper (still wrong, but slightly less wrong) wouldn't be a wise investment. Anyway, that belief stuff can also be called "faith" if I didn't telegraph my moves transparently enough for you to already know where this was going. Some people have amazing faith and can do amazing things, or could. You know, you could move mountains, Moses parted the Red Sea, etc. etc. I'm not even sure about this, but I think only mind-dwellers can have faith. I mean, faith is how we move between meatspace worlds, after all. It's really, incredibly difficult to hold the kind of faith to do even a small thing, though. Like, walking on water is kinda neat, but it doesn't really affect the universe, you know, yet the one man who ever did it had to have the word of god in living form right in front of him telling him to believe that word, AND he still failed after a second. Moses needed a talisman to focus on, that staff, and he more believed that it was doing the parting than that he was. He also faltered a bunch. It's freakin HARD to believe things your mind doesn't want to accept, and to steer outside the mundane universe. You quickly fall back into old comfortable patterns and let things be easier. I used the word "talismans" just now, and mentioned that people who believe magic is real live in a world where it is, and those things are kindof interesting if only as an aside.. A lot of that hoodoo stuff is sortof real.. they really are messing with forces they don't understand, with faith, and they really can perhaps do things sometimes with those forces, even without knowing God, or in contravention of him. Because it's the soul that has faith, and faith is the ability to move in the mindspace dimension. The thing is, what they can do, it only exists inside this world, the one little meatspace cell. So they misunderstand its importance tremendously, they are going the same place they ever went, just with more interesting mistakes than most of us make. But yeah, that stuff, it also would depend on you believing, so they can't actually affect you with it, you're not going to have faith in that kind of weird shit. If one of them came before you to "prove" they can do things, they would fail and you would laugh at them.. and also in their universe they'd burn you to a cinder with a spell and think how cool they were for showing off their amazing power. Because everyone is right, and we're mind-dwellers who move amongst infinite possibilities that all exist in some meaning of that word. But the fact that you can follow that thought means it's not right, exactly, because the concept of what is correct can't exist here. Anyway, the difference between having faith in something, and having faith AND God on your side, is night and day. Those of us who know better should only ever do the latter, obviously. Those other forces really are dark, they are part of those idea-beings that want to pull you away from God, and make you forget his idea-being that touches your mind-self and lives within it. They can live within you too, simultaneously, and probably at least some of them do. "Fear is the mind-killer" is sortof a real thing, because there's a voice that tries to drag you down with fear every time you do something important, like as I'm writing down all this shit it's trying to stop me with a whole host of different reasons, or it's trying to trick me into changing it just enough that it loses its connection to the word.. which itself is a pretty good fear that almost works. Thinking about those things or trying to understand them, though, really only gives them power, gives them more living space inside your mind, so there's no good reason to do that. We need to focus on the good. As long as you do that, can remember that God is good and he lives in you, none of those things can TOUCH you. There is never anything to fear. Somehow this takes me back to that "bad things only happen to good people" then, and I'm really running off the rails by even trying to describe it, because this part I don't know, I'm just kinda trying to guess wildly. I don't want to know more, because I don't want to experience it firsthand. But basically, everything you've ever heard of that was something horrible happening, and which obviously actually did happen inside our universe, it was all the work of dark forces, and it was all in service of one end, to shake people's faith (in god, who manifests in our world and inside our minds as the very idea of love.) So, the whole idea of martyred saints exists because some people did so much good they had to be made an example of, to scare you out of following their path. But the examples aren't those people, either. I think.. I'm pretty sure that in their world, God came down to smite their persecutors and take them home with him right that minute. Thing is, that universe ended at that moment. God can't do that kind of thing without completely obliterating the fabric of space-time. And you exist in a universe which did not end at that moment, so that saint died horribly where you exist. And that's also partly because the opposite is true: if he hadn't been stopped and made an example of in the first place, and just lived a normal life, that world had more goodness in it than ours, more than the little tiny slice of god that lives in you and in all of us. And you don't have that much good in you, not yet, so you couldn't enter that area of mindspace. There exists an area of mindspace in full harmony with God and goodness and love, and if you can keep him with you, you're on the path to reach it, always. I want to say "when you die" but that doesn't actually even make any sense, because "when" doesn't exist there. (for that matter, "there" doesn't exist in that mindspace, but you know, whatever. The information to describe it still can't exist in this universe, so no amount of investigation or contemplation can ever be anything but babble.) I actually don't think God can enter our universe in even the tiniest way without ripping it to shreds, that's why he had to custom-design a special being inside of one special person who could have enough faith to grow that being, and then bring a little bit more of his word into that one being than can fit in a "normal" meat-man. That was awesome and powerful and made a splash that reverberated across all of our space-time universe, and the bible rode on that attention wave to reach your world. Not to mention, the first half had to exist to even create a world where a person could have that kind of faith, and it involved touching lots of others along the way. But God's primary presence in our world is inside our thoughts (which aren't really "in" our world, at least not entirely.) I know a little better since he very briefly touched mine, though my understanding is still meaninglessly wrong. Obviously not all of the results of Jesus' splash were "good" in this world, all those wars and etc., many people did very bad things in Jesus' name, because they were that twisted up about what it all meant. Their mistakes seem massive to you from your perspective, but yours would horrify them as well (e.g. the sheer scale of the human-suffering machine that made your iPhone possible is mind-boggling, and it's not the only problematic thing you have.) So yeah, "nobody's perfect " encompasses all possible mistakes, from failing to say "I love you" once, to committing mass genocide. People who make mistakes can come to God, or can have already come to God and still made their mistake. ANY mistake. Jesus was the one and only shining perfect example, and you only know him through a faint shadow, the words that both had to be captured by fallible humans and then passed along through millennia of history including a few translations and revisions. Even with all that separation, you can kinda see the perfection, and then you can misunderstand it, try to be what he was, and make mistakes everywhere you go. You're not good, you try to be. You carry the idea of good. What you actually do is all bad, but as long as you keep trying, you still know God. Even if you commit genocide or inflict unimaginable suffering, directly or indirectly, you could still be with God. I guess.. I don't really understand how it could possibly happen that you understand that idea and still inflict suffering on anyone, at least intentionally. I strongly suspect that anyone who loves God would NEVER do things like genocide. Yet somehow, I do think some have, where the societal norms were different and they hadn't learned enough of the science of morality to understand how wrong they were, at that time in their universe. I don't know, it's incomprehensible to me, and I don't have to understand it anyway, but it's possible. If you find out some horrifying truth about what you've been doing all your life, discover you've made a mistake and done something that you've always believed to be unforgivable, it isn't. Nothing is unforgivable. Turn to god, and the idea of love, know that it was a mistake, and if you actually accepted his light, you won't intentionally do that again, because of course you wouldn't, now that you know the truth about it. I really have lost my way here, though, because I reach the idea of suffering.. and I don't understand that at all. I haven't suffered, and I don't want to know anything more than I already do about what it's like to suffer. But people do, some live entire lives of suffering, and it's not something they deserve, it's not because of anything they did (though it very much is the result of things PEOPLE did.) Oh shit, no, I think I do have it, or some tiny piece of it, but this makes even less sense than all the stuff that didn't make sense before. All those other people, the one who murdered your family, the suffering kid who made your iPhone, the line of homeless people at the shelter, they ARE you. You are a mind dweller and don't have a presence in just this one body, even as you're limited to it. In order to truly find that community with god, big you from outside this world DOES have to live an entire lifetime of suffering, and even an infinity of lifetimes of pure suffering. That sounds completely scary to little you in your semi-comfortable meatspace, even though you know all of the things around you good or bad are going to fade and none of it actually matters, including your happiness or suffering. It's scary to think of, but when it happens to you it won't be scary. You'll have the strength to endure it, because you won't travel to that space (you know, not-space) except where/how/if you do have that strength. In a world where time isn't, this sortof makes sense, (I started to say "until you have the strength" but that doesn't apply at all to not-time,) but in our little world, it's another piece of information that can't exist. But just, sometimes, when you meet another mind-dweller, it could be you. You're both cells in a greater organism in your own little meat spaces, and you have independent meat thoughts, and you even can steer in mindspace so that you're no longer in the same universe. But at that moment you can cross paths with yourself, nonetheless. So you literally might be mistreating yourself, many times when you make mistakes. You may make the other pieces of you suffer more, and you'll be able to forgive yourself, because you know how ignorant you were when you made that happen, at least somewhere inside that mind-universe that's behind your eyes, in that realm of subconscious thoughts and whatever else we can't see or understand. Once you're free of all of it, which is soon (but also "never" in meatspace.. just remember your mind-dweller can traverse meat-spaces, spans many, and then know it also can leave them behind altogether when it's ready. - once it has grown enough and "photosynthesized" enough of god's light to be strong for the trip.) Ugh, this is all like trivia! Not only am I barely capturing the idea, but these things I'm saying will make many people reject my words outright, and none of it is necessary information; you can come to God's kingdom without understanding a word of this drivel. Or understanding perfectly what I am saying, and disagreeing with it with all your heart, too. None of it's important. All of it's fascinating, and I love thinking about it and how cool it is, but I think maybe it's not healthy to try to understand what can't be understood, and saying things whether they're true or not about this kind of stuff, those are words that can provoke the kind of anger that makes someone kill you, so why risk that, for parts that aren't important? The only reason I can think of, if it's still godly to share, is that it's because this *particular* piece of god's word isn't for those people who would reject it. It's for the tiny little handful of people who need this extra explanation to convince them when they decide they agree. Just, I don't know how niche that is; is it only for my own mind, to jog my memory later, because no one else in the world would appreciate this? If it's that, letting other people read it could only be bad. I just don't know. Obviously, what I'm doing here is trying to tap my stream of consciousness, and then distill out the parts that belong to God, leaving out the nonsense, because I saw him in there for a moment, and I wanted to share that so badly. That moment has passed and it still reverberates but not as strongly. I don't know how to describe that, since I know that even the hottest moment is really most meaningful only to me, and I was only able to share a little picture of ME, not of god. Just thankfully he lives in me and his face is in there a little bit. My trouble is that niche bit, because it seems like a pretty narrow niche. Some people will see where I finally start talking about Jesus and referencing scripture, and although they liked some of the science parts of this, that turns them off and they're no longer interested cause now I'm just a regular old religious nut. Others, they loved referencing it to Jesus and scripture, didn't care too much about the science, but then I said the bible isn't perfect, and they REALLY shut down. That isn't dogma! It doesn't match the thing I've been chanting to myself all this time! Burn it all! Neither one of them is wrong. That dogma helps people keep the idea, some NEED that kind of talisman, like Moses needed his staff, and they have to keep it pure or it will distort and fade. Others recognize that as superstition as surely as wearing lucky socks to make your baseball team win. And then, since that dogmatic stuff is superstition, obviously everything that it came from is bullshit, including scripture. "Look at those fools reciting their little poems and thinking it matters! I am smart enough to believe the things I can see unlike those idiot bible-thumpers!" Like I said, those people aren't wrong either, because all of those pieces--the scriptures, the dogma, the crosses and aphorisms--are in this world, and they DON'T matter, no matter how much you revere them or how much they helped you, they may not help everyone. Some people need a way to see God without those tools, and if that's what they need, as fishers of men, you should find the right lure, which doesn't include those things at all. Oh, good, we're back, that's the important things I actually do need to say, I'm so happy I found it again! What we/I need to be talking about, always, is that goodness, and how to pass that thought into others' heads where it can live. The particulars of forgiveness and how it works, and what suffering is for, and why everyone is worth saving, or even and especially which parts of scripture might be right or misguided, those things are wonderful distractions, but they aren't important compared to passing that love to everyone you can, no matter where or who they are, if they come within your reach then you must reach them. (Of course, we will not do what we must, we will fail more often than not, and may make HUGE mistakes like inquisitors killing someone with torture instead of convincing them to hear.) So I guess this is good after all, and it's certainly grown long enough.