Abarim Publications' online Biblical Greek Dictionary

κομεω

• Together with the noun γλωσσα (glossa), tongue (or reed of musical instruments): the noun γλωσσοκομον (glossokomon), which may have denoted a box in which reeds were stored, but which also may have described a medical instrument of some sort. It was an attribute of Judas Iscariot (John 12:6 and 13:29 only).
• The verb κομιζω (komizo), meaning to take care of, to carefully carry, to carry within oneself and hence to receive within oneself or within one's care. This verb is used 11 times; see full concordance, and from it in turn derive:
  • Together with the preposition εκ (ek), meaning out, from or of: the verb εκκομιζω (ekkomizo), meaning to carefully carry out (Luke 7:12 only).
  • Together with the preposition συν (sun), meaning together with: the verb συγκομιζω (sugkomizo), to carefully carry together (Acts 8:2 only).

κομη

• The verb κομαω (komao), meaning to grow and cultivate an elaborate hairdo. This verb occurs in 1 Corinthians 11:14 and 11:15 only, where Paul submits that nature teaches that a man should have short hair and a woman long. It's is a bit of a mystery what Paul meant with that since nature gives long hair to both men and women. But perhaps Paul utilized the Hebrew senses of both hair (namely that of retained memory; see θριξ, thrix, next), and that of the genders (in Hebrew, masculinity is the tendency to be an individual, whereas femininity is the tendency to be collective), which suggests that Paul meant to say that cultures should cherish their very long memories whereas individuals should not take in account a wrong suffered and be eager to move on.

θριξ

• The adjective τριχινος (trichinos), meaning hairen, or made of hair, a relatively rare but not unusual word that described clothing made from hair (wool) rather than leather or some other material. It occurs in the New Testament in Revelation 6:12 only, in the enigmatic statement of the sun becoming black as hairen sackcloth — obviously descriptive of a fearful mind (see below) rather than some woolen bag.

κηνσος

κοσμος

• The verb κοσμεω (kosmeo), meaning to be orderly, fittingly, adorned in a good sense, or "worldly" in a bad sense, depending on the context. It needs to be remembered that even though totalitarianism and tyranny was the proverbial antichrist, the nature of Christ is to live lovingly among tyrants and slaves alike (John 3:16-17), and try to save as many as possible, preferably without getting killed. If standing in the occasional line will keep you from getting crucified, then stand in line and preserve your precious human life.
  The noun παρθενος (parthenos) means "virgin" but also denoted Greece's novel city-republic (read our article on Mary). The story of the "ten virgins" who arose and "put in order" their lamps (Matthew 25:7) is of course also a commentary on how the most successful Hellenic governments took proper care of their wisdom elite. A similar double meaning is presented in 1 Peter 3:5, but concerning classical chiefdoms and monarchies. Likewise, the expelled evil spirit who returned with seven vile buddies, also provides a commentary on how not to rid your society of unwanted elements (Matthew 12:44, Luke 11:25. To illustrate this: the porn-industry the way we know it didn't exist until in 1857 queen Victoria's government came up with the Obscene Publications Act to ban trade in obscenities. More recently: the freezing of WikiLeaks' bank accounts forced it to accept Bitcoin, which propelled the currency onto its celebrated rise). In Matthew 23:29, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of "putting in order" the tombs of the righteous, which probably meant they made tourist attractions out of the legacies of successful thinkers of antiquity.
  In Titus 2:10, Paul hopes that the teachings of the Lord might "put order" into all things, and John the Revelator saw the New Jerusalem "put in order" like a bride (Revelation 21:2).
  This verb is used 10 times in the New Testament, see full concordance.
• The adjective κοσμικος (kosmikos), meaning orderly or worldly in the sense of pertaining to or being of or situated within the world-order. This word occurs only twice. In Titus 2:12 Paul speaks of "world-orderly aspirations," which might have something to do with those hard-to-suppress considerations of violent totalitarianism which are sometimes provoked in the meekest of us. In Hebrews 9:1 our adjective modifies another adjective, namely αγιον (agion), which is the neutral form of αγιος (agios), meaning "holy," and the common word for "holy place" or tabernacle/temple. One of the main functions of the tabernacle was to have Israel organize around it and in response to it.
• The adjective κοσμιος (kosmios), meaning orderly or worldly in the sense of sharing the qualities of the world-order. Paul is the only New Testament author who uses this word, twice, in rapid succession. In 1 Timothy 2:9 he urges women to not be kosmios in respect of their coiffure, but in 1 Timothy 3:2 he insists that it behooves the male overseer to indeed be kosmios. He probably did not mean that overseers should wear ribbons in their hair, but he surely also didn't mean that they should be like the Romans. Paul probably meant that overseers should make an effort to blend into society, no matter how much they loathed its rigidity and lifelessness. Paul himself was so good at playing the blending-in game that he managed to gain personal access to the emperor himself (who, it should be clear, presided over 60 million evenly uppity subjects and had better things to do than to entertain charmless contraries).
• Together with the verb κρατεω (krateo), meaning to hold on or hold in one's power: the noun κοσμοκρατωρ (kosmokrator), meaning world-order holder or world-order controller. This noun occurs in Greek literature as epithet of world-ruling deities, but in New Testament times it denoted the (deified) Roman emperor (Ephesians 6:12 only).

— The Cosmology of Consciousness —

The story of the king who gave a banquet

Imagine you are appointed librarian over a library with ten thousand books. But these books are all piled on a great heap and you have no idea what is where. You might as well have one thousand books, or fifty thousand. It makes no difference. It's a colossal mess. And when someone gives you an additional book, you have no idea where to put it, or whether you already have it or not.

If your name happens to be Zenodotus and the library is the one of Alexandria, you will quickly begin to organize all books into a dozen or so categories, so that now each category contains less than a thousand books. Then you label each book according to its title, and store them all alphabetically. When all that is complete, you have a perfect overview of what the library contains, where everything is, and to which existing category any new book should be added.

Intelligence works the same way. Intelligence is not a matter of knowing more facts (more books on the great pile) but about organizing the facts: by establishing general categories and so reducing cluster-sizes, and ordering things inside the clusters by means of an ordering system. Intelligence is not about knowing more but about knowing your way around what you know.

Now imagine:

1. You're a pizza dude and you've walked into a party to deliver a stack of pizzas. There are about 100 people there, but you don't know anybody's name. You have no idea what's going on, who is what to whom, what happened before or what might happen next.
2. Now imagine that you are a Golden Retriever named Lex, and you are at that same party. You see the same 100 people, and without trying very hard you smell a smattering of obvious alcoholics and smokers, some folks who smell of the same laundry detergent, some folks who smell of the same recent meal, some folks who live near the same lavender field, and so on. This allows you to quickly establish probable allegiances and make a few useful assumptions about who's what to whom, and what might happen next.
3. Now imagine that you are granny Goldman, who's celebrating her hundredth birthday together with 100 friends and loved ones: children plus spouses, grandchildren plus spouses, great-grandchildren, plus a slew of neighbors and a few old friends from out of town, and of course Lex, your loving canine companion. You know precisely who smokes and will thus disappear to the back porch. You know who drinks too much, and will certainly get into a fight with their spouses or a cousin or two. You know who came together and who will leave together, who are prone to get into arguments with whom and what about. You know who cares about what and whom, who will seek out each other's company and complete each other. You know the fidelities and pacts, the frictions and feuds. You quietly overlook your hundred guests and see a vast dynamic world behind their faces; a dynamic that also includes familiar people who couldn't make it to the party today, and which even extends into a much larger world of neighbors and friends you have not yet met.

Languages are exactly like that. When we moderns walk through our world, we don't consciously recite the names of the things we notice. In the exact same way, we also don't consciously recite every word in a text we read. When we read, our eyes fly over the words and our mind stiches the words together into a single coherent experience. Likewise when we walk through our world, our eyes detect things that our mind knows the words of, and stiches the words together into the experience we call consciousness.

Words are not like the lifeless pixels that make up photos, but much rather like clusters of grapes that grow together on common branches (Genesis 9:20, Isaiah 5:1, John 15:5). Words like bind, band, bond, bondage and bundle are obviously related, and all stem from one patriarchal expression (in this case the Proto-Indo-European "bhendh-," meaning to bind). Above we mentioned that nowadays life only comes from life, but that life originally emerged from lifeless dust, and that only during a narrow window of time (in the Bible described in the first two chapters of Genesis). Words are like that, because language is just like life.

The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

In the beginning [of language], very large groups of pre-language humans were naturally interacting and grunted and harumphed like any other animal. But some twist in humanity's core nature gave humans the desire to imitate each other's verbal expression, and like a hydrogen cloud contracting, the humans converged upon a common center of expressive gravity, until they arrived at a handful of standardized terms: words that symbolized items that had literally been on everybody's lips, and were now jointly known by common terms. This tiresome process would never again repeat and all other words that would ever come to exist would be derived from existing ones that in turn all derived from the handful of First Words that had miraculously crystalized out of the formless waters of human interaction.

As Lex the dog will readily demonstrate, all animals have feelings and those feelings are exactly the same as our human feelings (same limbic system, same hormones). Lex might be able to smell fear or arousal in others but otherwise, those feelings, their details and causes are entirely private and exist wholly within our own selves. Not so with language. The words of a language exists solely in multiple heads at once. That's why they're words. Feelings can only exist in one head at once but words must exist in two or more. A word that sits only in one head is not a word but a growl.

Feelings are soulical and exist only in the dungeon of our own bellies. Words are spiritual and our minds soar in the heaven they form. Words truly are a whole next level of existence, and allow thoughts to drift from one head to the next and spread over the human world like clouds in the sky.

Not all proto-human societies produced words, just like not all dust-of-the-earth produced life (just like, much later, not all writing systems would produce the alphabet, or all visitors of the outer court would make it to the inner one). But once the miracle had been birthed, even as a tiny seed, it would sprout vast forests of life that quickly spread all over the world.

And here is the moral of our pizza story: languages have innate intelligence. Languages consist of dots (words) that connect etymologically, and which allow the speaker to connect the dots of their environment into the patterns that we call consciousness. Everybody sees the same dots, but the patterns we see between the dots depend on the language we use to connect them.

The language that is the software upon which our consciousness runs, may either be a clueless pizza delivery guy, or it is a dog whose world consists mostly of webs of lingering scents, or it is a granny Goldman, whose memory tells of layers upon layers of invisible meaning. The more etymological connections there are between words, the more patterns there are within the language, the more connections it reveals between things in the physical world, and thus the more intelligent the language is. The degree of sense that a human can make out of her visible world depends on her own intelligence but also on the intelligence of the language in which she thinks.

The classical Hebrew in which the Bible was written is arguably the most intelligent language that has ever existed. Have a look at the vast etymological terebinths that exists in roots like פלל (palal) or דמם (damam) or קרר (qarar). Compared to the overall size of the language, these are massive word clusters (Numbers 13:23), massive deltas of thought or galaxies of consciousness.

The First Words described things that everybody could point at and call something. That means that words for abstract ideas (i.e. real things that you cannot see: love, brotherhood, law, God) could only come into existence when writing gave them a "body" to be pointed at. Societies that have no script have very few words for things that can't be seen. And an exploratory dialogue carried by a commonly accepted vocabulary for unseen things can only exist when a critical mass of people can read. Consciousness depends on words, and a consciousness of abstractions depends on script and mass literacy.

Consciousness (i.e. thinking in words) had very slowly arisen on earth like a mist from the ground, but when the Hebrew alphabet was completed (which in real-time coincided with the beginning of the Iron Age, around the time of David, roughly 1000 BC), it formed a mighty river that began to water all the world (Psalm 46:4, Revelation 22:1). And this is more than a poetic metaphor. The ancients understood that there is, quite literally, a cognitive aspect to the hydrological cycle — see our article on νεφελη (nephele), cloud.

Things hidden since the foundation of the world

Modern humanity does not consist of merely us naked apes. Modern humanity is us apes, plus dogs, plus cattle. We humans are as much a distillate from our wild forbears as dogs are from wolves and wooly sheep are from wild mouflon. And the key is that these domesticated species all domesticated each other. Modern humanity is the collective bubble in which modern humans, modern sheep and modern dogs collectively exist. This means that sheep and dogs are as "human" as we humans are (just like someone from Albany is as much a New Yorker as someone from New York).

The celebrated agricultural revolution that resulted in modern humanity (i.e. humans, dogs, sheep, cows, tomatoes, potatoes, and so on) wasn't a unique event but rather a manifestation of a series of highly similar events (Ecclesiastes 1:9) that had happened for the same reasons, and never happened by chance or force. The very early farm was a place where the world's wimps and losers cowered together in a state of near-unnatural cooperation: a kind of Rick's Café Américain in the Casablanca of the natural world, where the Mortified gathered for an extended lease on life and so formed a whole new and beautiful friendship. The rise of complex molecules, eukaryosynthesis, the mutual domestication of humans and dogs and then the herds, the spread of the alphabet and thus mass literacy, the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ: all these events are self-similar; they all started with an act of extreme hospitality and resulted in the creation of a beast-of-many-beasts or a house-of-many-houses.

Hebrew, obviously, is the proto-human great ape of our story, the Rick if you will, the ποιμην (poimen), or shepherd. Rick's Morty is clearly canine and derives from the wild dog that is classical Greek (see our lengthy article on Hellas). Purposefully bred, Koine Greek became the shepherd's domesticated κυων (kuon), dog. Upon the fall of Troy, a proverbial man of sorrows called Aeneas, the Latin answer to "sly" Odysseus (in turn echoing Genesis 27:36), journeyed to Italy and sired the people who would be the Romans: their kingdom started when a she-wolf nourished their iteration of the Cain and Abel archetype (the Latin word for wolf, lupus, relates to the Greek λυπη, lupe, meaning sorrow).

These two freshly domesticated hounds, Greek and Latin, set out to herd the languages of Europe. The introduction of decimal number notation (9th century AD) corresponds to the start of the machine age (invention of the wheel: 5th millennium BC). A cyborg blend of English and math became computer code (20th century AD), which corresponds to the start of the Age of Weaving (4th millennium BC).

Long story short: if your native language — that is the language in which you think and dream; the language of your subconscious that continuously and involuntarily weaves the consciousness with which you review and navigate your world — is classical Hebrew, you are like granny Goldman, who regards her world and its history as a multi-dimensional fractal matrix, in which all things are variations (or elements or combinations) of earlier things, and all things exist and work together in an harmonic and dynamic whole.

If your native language is Koine Greek or early Latin, you are Lex the dog, who takes her immediate cues from granny Goldman, but otherwise follows her nose into the lasting legacy of a predatorial past.

If your innermost language is English, you will barely notice any innate patterns in the things around you. And that in turn means that you don't see the great oneness of all things; you might know of it but you don't see it (John 20:29). What you see rather resembles a huge cloud of dust. Not because you are myopic, but because your language is (and myopia is really a mild form of blindness).

If your language-of-thought is English and the consistency of your language-of-thought is the only authority you have (meaning: you are not a trained scientist, philosopher, coder or logician and you literally go by what you see), then your experience will dictate that literally anything can happen. Subsequently, your defining quality of something "real" is not that it fits a much larger but invisible context, but rather that you "believe" it: a face in the clouds, or the idea that JFK got shot by a passing UFO, or that the moon landing was faked, or that vaccines turn you into a zombie, and so on. Since Frank P. Ramsey we know that any pattern (i.e. Nessie, Bigfoot, Elvis, aliens, constellations) can be found in any large enough set of unrelated elements. This means that the existence of certain theories does not depend on the amount of evidence, but rather on the language their believers speak.

From sheep came wool, and from wool came the modern world, for which we moderns are of course eternally grateful. But a person with a sheep mind will not ever be able to peer outside her sheep-box, and a person with a shepherd mind will never expect her to.

To sheep-people, the story of Adam naming the animals (Genesis 2:19-20) will seem like something that could perfectly occur in reality, and that is fine. But to others, this story is about proto-humanity discovering the miracle of language. Sheep will regard Peter's vision of the great animal-filled sheet (Acts 10:11) as just that, but others will naturally link it both to Adam's naming protocol and the story of the Ark of Noah (and Rick's Café Américain). The story of Noah's Ark in turn is surely about a man in a boat with all the animals escaping a global flood, but also (and to some, much more so) rather alike Michaelangelo's depiction of God within a human skull. Michaelangelo's creator God, in turn, is not God in an absolute sense, but rather Immanuel: God's detected presence among and by humanity (John 1:14), meaning that Immanuel weaves together Adam as much as Adam weaves together Immanuel, in a chicken-and-egg sort of way (see Luke 2:52).

The sheep-people never considered this, while the others never did not. Those latter people will remember that Paul wrote: God is not concerned about oxen, now is he? (1 Corinthians 9:9), whereas the first will insist that this Pauline quote has as nothing to do with Michaelangelo's skull or Noah's Ark or Peter's sheet or Adam's names. And all of that is fine. At Rick's, we proudly serve all kinds.

People with the rare ability to switch their subconscious language between their modern and some classical language, literally have multiple minds and live in multiple realities and switch at will. In literature, these people are depicted as shape-shifters: people who can shift between the form of a man and an animal such as a great cat (Hellboy's Ben Daimio) or wolf (any werewolf story) or bat (Dracula, Batman) or a bear (Tolkien's Beorn).

On earth as it is in heaven

When the ancient philosophers began to apply their common word for human order, namely κοσμος (kosmos), to the universe at large, they did a great deal more than declare the chaotic Olympian gods out and mathematical rigor in. They in fact enlarged the human earth to encompass the universe. They planted their flag; they claimed space for the people of earth. And they also connected the human mind to the greater cosmos in a chicken-and-egg sort of way.

Not only was the cosmos declared to be an orderly affair, rather than a chaotic one, it was also understood to reflect the state of the human consciousness, like a vast mirror. A text has meaning to a reader only if that meaning already exists in the reader, and the reader merely recognizes this existing meaning in the text she's looking at. A dog does not recognize a man in a marble statue, but a human observer is unable to not see the man. Likewise the universe: a disorderly mind (or a sheep or dog mind) sees vast chaos within and without, but an orderly mind sees vast order within and without.

Prior to the Bronze Age collapse, the Mycenean Greeks had already venerated some Tris Heros, or triple hero (hence probably also Genesis 18:2), which developed into the Trismegistos (thrice great; hence probably also the legend of the three wise men, which developed from the unnumbered magi of Matthew 2:1). The epithet Trismegistos became applied to a curious synthesis of the Greek messenger-god Hermes and the Egyptian god of wisdom Toth, to ultimately form Hermes Trismegistos, the "author" of the Hermetica (and inventor of an air-tight glass, hence our English term hermetically closed).

Hermes Trismegistos also famously declared: "As above, so below; as below, so above," which Jesus in turn confirmed when he prayed: "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10).

The Hebrew Bible spoke of (1) heaven, (2) earth and (3) waters under the earth (Exodus 20:4). And John wrote: "There are three that bear witness, the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three are as one" (1 John 5:8). Blood, as is obvious, equals life: the entire earthly biosphere, including all emotions of all animals. Water, equally obviously, represents the entire cosmological economy of energy, including all forces and material particles. And spirit, as we have discussed above, is the realm of words.

These three great realms exist like Russian dolls within each other, and, more importantly, are self-similar: all three develop similarly and according to the same dynamics. And structures and relations that exist in one also exist in the others. That means that when someone understands the world of words, she also understands the biosphere and also the universe at large. There is no paint-by-number correlation but if she can compute particles, she can also compute thoughts (Genesis 13:16). And if she can traverse minds, she can also trek the stars (Genesis 15:5). That is of course great news because a library is cheaper and much more fun than a particle accelerator and a space telescope (John 21:25).

Abraham's seed was to be like (1) the dust of the earth, (2) the sand on the sea shore, on the border between water and solid ground, and (3) stars in the sky (Genesis 13:6, 15:5, 22:17; also see Galatians 3:16). This means that the Israelites understood that beside the few thousand stars their naked eyes could see twinkle in the night sky, there were layers upon layers of billions of them in a howling infinite of space. God once made living things out of the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7, also see Acts 2:4), and so the Israelites also knew that stars, somehow, worked together to make soul-like realms that, somehow, exceeded the continuum of regular spacetime (Philippians 3:10-11).

The Hebrew verb נהר (nahar) means both to flow (of water) and to shine (of light), which demonstrates that long before Einstein figured out the math, the Israelites understood that light consists of droplets but shows up in waves, comes out of a source, follows gravity, gives life and permeates all "dry land".

And speaking of the dust of the earth, here's its Standard Model:

Abraham		Nahor
12 sons of Jacob	12 sons of Ishmael	8 sons of Milcah and 4 of Reumah
light-bringers	bow-benders	wife-givers
surviving tribes: Judah and Benjamin	surviving tribes: Kedar and Nebaioth
and eternity commenced! (Ephesians 2:14)

Fresh out of Egypt (and both Ishmael's mother and wife had been Egyptian), the Israelites began to self-organize around their nucleic tabernacle (Exodus 26:30, Hebrews 8:5), which housed the Ark of the Covenant, in which was the Law. This Law was written, which was spectacular, also because the alphabet wouldn't be completed for another four centuries (meaning that Deuteronomy 6:4-9 also commands to create script).

The Ten Commandments, from which all subsequent law and even all other alphabetic writing derives, consisted of two sets, divided over two tablets: one set pertained to the Father and the other pertained to the Mother (אמם, 'amam, means both mother and people). The tabernacle was a prokaryotic tent but over time grew into the eukaryotic temple.

The armies of Babel destroyed the temple, but in Persia, Jewry established itself in a network of synagogues, which all maintained their own perfect copy of the constitutional Law plus subsequent Scriptures, through their invention of the systemic postal service. After a few small steps for man, the postal service became the Internet. And although the overwhelming majority of organic and inorganic molecules seems to imagine that a living soul exists to spread cat memes, it really doesn't. It exists to sustain the journey of our ever adapting genome to grand unification.

It's still somewhat of a mystery where DNA came from but the popular panspermia theory proposes that it formed naturally among the stars (here at Abarim Publications we additionally surmise that this formation somehow had to do with resonance to a Chladni pattern of gravitational waves generated by rotating black holes, but that's private speculation). Then it came from heaven to earth and descended into the dark and lifeless depths of the ocean. There, around naturally occurring hypothermal vents, it gathered its first disciples, and became a living body — and see our article on Stephen for a much more detailed version of this story.

A light through yonder window

When we walk through our world on a sunny day, we see things because the sun makes them visible and gives them color. But we've just established that when we look at our world we really look into a mirror. That means that the sun above our head is literally the same as our ratio within our head.

Everything we see around us is actually inside us. We only observe a thing when data from that thing (light, sound, smell) has traveled through space, entered our senses and crossed our outer membranes, turned into an electromagnetic signal that hopefully corresponds to a word from our memory, from which our internal librarian spins a picture, which it weaves in the greater internal tapestry that we readily mistake for the world around us. Because no, we have no means at all to sense the outside world, and the tapestry we call observable reality is only within ourselves. Our brain is like our telephone: it picks up a signal out of a lot of noise, and turns that into a human voice that wasn't there before. Colors, voices; they're all inside our head, not outside it. Our reality is our experience, which sits within us, and we are not aware of anything else than our experience, to which we are confined. We only see what we have detected and absorbed (i.e. "eaten"). Even when we see other people, we see them (inside of us) but we don't see their world. We really only see ours, and the sun we see is ours alone.

Other people are like pictures that hang on the walls of the prison cell that is our experience. We cannot see inside their heads to see their world, illuminated by their sun. But if we could, they would transform from flat and dark pictures to little windows in the wall of our prison. Through those windows, light from different suns would stream into our world. They would be like strings of Christmas lights. They would be like stars!

Words are truly not of this world. They're not "things" but something utterly other: baffling miracles, that reproduce against all laws of data preservation and limitation, like oil from a jar that never stops flowing (2 Kings 4:1-7), or bread that keeps on breaking (Matthew 14:16-21). Words are the only "things" that exist in multiple heads at once, and the only way to gauge someone else's view on the world is to ask them to describe it in those words we share between us.

Without many different minds, there can be no words, which means that words are solid proof that the world (and everybody in it) is not an invention of our own crazy mind. Whenever we hear something said that we couldn't have made up ourselves, which baffles us and strikes us dumb, which shudders our very core or sets of laughing uncontrollably, is absolute proof that we are not alone (hence the name Isaac, which means He Will Cause Laughter). Without words, we are prisoners of our own experience. With words, we can see through countless eyes (Ezekiel 1:18, Revelation 4:8).

The individual human ratio is a giant furnace that fuses the atoms of observation into bigger atoms, and so liberates the light that illuminates our world. And all kinds of things can go wrong with that furnace. It may run out of fuel and simply fizzle out and turn cold (it may even not have enough mass to start the fire in the first place). It may have burned nearly all its fuel and sit on a vast heart of pitiless iron, panting red with exhaustion (while burning all the life it once sustained in its own Goldilocks Zone). Our own private sun may be hugely far away, so that we see it as a mere solitary pin-prick in an otherwise permanent night. Or it's much too close and fills up half our sky and blinds us and burns whatever plastic wings we deployed to get up so high.

One would think that, over the eons, humans would have selected themselves so that the white dwarfs and the pin-pricks, the red giants and the high fliers were all left behind, and we're now all pretty much seeing the same sized sun. But no, we're still quite diverse.

Jingle bells, bell curves

The Hebrew word for flesh is בשר (basar), and flesh is the soft tissue of a living organism. This noun for flesh comes from the verb בשר (basar), which means to bring glad tidings, tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy. So, when Jesus says: "Eat my flesh" (John 6:51-58), he says "absorb my glad tidings" rather than "become cannibals." The Greek word for flesh is σαρξ (sarx), from which comes the adjective σαρκασμος (sarkasmos), flesh-biting, which in English became the noun "sarcasm."

To Lex the Retriever, the words αγγελος (aggelos), meaning messenger (or angel), and ευαγγελιον (euaggelion), meaning good message (eu-angel or evangel), smell like two people using the same lavender shampoo. To granny Goldman, the two words מלך (melek), king, and מלאך (mal'ak), messenger (or angel), tell of royalty and governance via communication networks. To the pizza delivery person, Imanuel is all about baby Jesus, and the words king, angel and evangel sound like nothing but the most psychotic time of the year.

When Jesus was dying on the cross, people thought he called out to Elijah (Matthew 27:47), who was a promised messenger (Malachi 4:5, Matthew 11:14, also see 17:1-13). The name Elijah in Greek is Ηλιας. This name's genitive is Ηλιου (meaning "of Elijah"), which is identical to the genitive of Ηλιος (Helios), the Greek word for the sun. That means that in Greek (and to Lex the dog), the term "Of Elijah" is identical to "Of The Sun". The name Elijah in Hebrew transliterates as God Is Yah, which is an equation of baffling depth (or so says granny Goldman). In English, the name Elijah belongs to some religious guy of long ago, made famous by Chi Coltrane.

Shepherds who keep watch over their flocks by night sing songs because it sooths the sheep. And it's fine that the sheep don't understand the words; nobody expects them to. What matters is that they are soothed.

It also doesn't matter where the information originated. All that matters is that information is not part of anybody's reality until it has come to us, crossed our physical membranes, was translated into our language-of-thought and has settled within us. That means that we don't have to take spaceships to go into outer space and meet alien societies. All we need to do is tune into their data stream that we have already long received. The result is literally identical to meeting them face to face.

Imagine a big tree with both flowers and berries hanging from its branches (obviously a very special tree, with steadfast branches and boughs true green; but also see Numbers 17:8). Now imagine that you are in a tiny spaceship within a branch, in the wood, in a vein under the bark floating along the tree's juices. You can't fly out of those juices just like you can't swim out of a pool. But these veins in which you float are like optic cables: you can see up into all the branches, down your own one and up all others, and even into the stems of all flowers and berries, as their signals rides the sap in the veins under the bark. That's what spacetime is like: a huge grapevine-structure. You can't fly out of it because there's no outside space to fly into. You can see the stars all around you because their light comes to you via gravity funnels that are like optic cables. You cannot see out of the tree, and you cannot have any idea what flowers (stars) and berries (black holes) would look like from the outside. The stars you see in the night sky are the insides of things that look entirely different on the outside. Perhaps you had no idea that there is an outside. But now you do.

All space and time exist within the tree, and the edge of spacetime is not very far away but all around you: light is the edge of the universe (Deuteronomy 30:12-14), and whatever goes slower than light exists within spacetime and whatever goes "faster", does not. Lightspeed is not a speed because at lightspeed distances become zero and time stops (at lightspeed there are no meters or seconds, and thus no meters-per-second). This is why light is the edge of spacetime (the "end of time" even): at lightspeed spacetime literally comes to an end. That means that faster-than-light is also not a speed, because travel at those "speeds" cannot occur in spacetime. Faster than light can only occur in "negative spacetime" with particles of "negative mass". This is where memory comes from, as we pointed out earlier (and see our article on the hypothetical faster-than-light particle called tachyon, from the adjective ταχυς, tachus, quick).

Mind sits on spacetime the way a 3D cube sits on a 2D square: the 3D cube is attached to the square (or each of its six squares, if you will) in every point on the 2D square, but not ever point of the 3D cube is attached to the 2D square. You can go from any point on the 2D square to any other, by utilizing the appropriate neural pathway.

Mind and memories take up no regular space and time. That's because they exist outside the tree, like the fragrance that wafts from the tree (Psalm 141:2, 2 Corinthians 2:14-15, Revelation 5:8). Because the tree has an outside, two blossoms or two berries (or two grapes) can be on different branches and thus vast distances apart when looked at from within the tree, but hang side by side from a perspective outside the tree. All spacetime that exists, exists within the tree, so no conventional signal or object can go outside it.

Outside the tree exists pure mind, in a transfinitively black and faster-than-light environment. But mind is as real as spacetime, and can be calculated and used to send signals through. We just have to develop the technology to separate the signals from the noise, so that we can learn the language and create a script, find messengers and invent an address system and roads and such. And that should be no problem at all once we know what we're doing, which we don't, as we only just entered the first interactions of the First Words phase. But it's the season to be jolly, so expect tidings of comfort and joy!

A civilization that has the proper technology will be able to survey the skies and locate other spiritual civilizations by scanning for their collective mental signature. A planet with life on it will broadcast a sleep-wake pattern like a quasar. A planet with intelligent life — and that is not merely high IQ life, but life that has found ways to exist in perpetual harmonious oneness — will show an significant increase in patterns that associate with alpha-waves, every seventh day. That's how the others will know that we're ready, and why they will show up.

Where no one alone has gone before

Like the speed of light, the top of a mountain is also its most extreme limit, but where the mountain ends is not where all of reality ends. That is why the smartest thing a person can do is establish the limits of their own understanding, plus get an idea of what might happen after that limit: what might reality be like when it can't be experienced by the self. In the early 1930s, Kurt Gödel famously figured out the math to the first part of this, but never quite got around to exploring the second.

At about one year of age, human children begin to recognize the limits of their own selves. At around age seven, this process has completed and the child is wholly aware that their own mind is unique in perspective and limited in scope. This is called Theory of Mind, and it's the reason why children ask questions. Animals, even "talking" animals such as Koko the Gorilla, ask no questions because they have no Theory of Mind. They are not aware of the limits of their own mind (Zechariah 4:6).

Following our model of earlier: a solar mind is a mind that is enlightened solely by its own reason, whereas a stellar mind is a mind that is enlightened by multiple ratios at once.

But there are a few additional tricks to this. If one's own sun is down (during the night), one's own ratio is below the horizon: one is asleep. Nocturnal animals scurry around their nightly world, and while they might be aware of the stars, they have no sun to center their world. They may have the moon, but not the sun.

The moon and the sun form the two main elements of one's own mind, just like one's emotions and ratio do. However, one's reason is all about light, which always comes from the sun, even when it reflects off the moon. Likewise one's emotional core equates not simply to the moon but rather to the common center of gravity (αγαπη, agape) shared by the moon, sun and to a minor degree the planets (gravity compares to sound in a Fourier kind of way, so planets sound like piccolo flutes over massive choirs; see our articles on πλανη, plane, planet, and φως, phos, light).

When one's center of gravity is in the opposite direction of one's center of light, one's emotions pull one way whereas one's reasonable mind pulls the other. Full moons like that commonly cause quite some turmoil: all visible light comes from the direction of one's emotional center and one's ratio is wholly under the horizon. When one's moon is in the same direction as one's sun, no light reflects off the moon, but one's reason and one's feelings are still somewhat askew.

The magic happens when one's moon and one's sun are both far above the horizon and begin to line up perfectly. When that has been completed, and one's reason and one's emotional center are perfectly aligned, the invisible moon has blocked out the sun, of which only the blazing corona remains. It's the middle of the day, but the ratio becomes still and the sky becomes dark and the stars and planets that had been there all along, now appear in all their glory.

A true stellar mind is not a nocturnal mind but a diurnal mind during a solar eclipse.

Exploring strange new worlds

Our ancient forbears realized that enlightenment is a wonderful thing, but also understood that there's something beyond it, namely the conscious and controlled eclipse of one's own enlightenment. It takes a trick or two to master, but consciously eclipsing one's own solar mind is wildly spectacular. It results in visions that are precisely like dreams (see οναρ, onar, dream), except that one is wide awake and fully aware, with an utterly alert internal librarian sorting books onto their proper shelves. As the prophet Daniel said, one's own dreams only reveal the thoughts of one's own heart (Daniel 2:30), but one's solar mind is a mere blip in the howling vastness of one's stellar mind.

When Tauriel explained the imprisoned Kili the nature of stars, she said: "Starlight is memory, precious and pure." Likewise, the Bible writers explained that every sin committed, every deed done, every work completed, every word spoken, every thought entertained, and every tear wept is stored in vast Akashic vaults, for anyone to read if they know its language (Exodus 32:33, Ecclesiastes 12:14, Psalm 56:8, 87:6, 90:8, Daniel 12:1, Malachi 3:16, Matthew 10:26, 12:36, Luke 10:20, 1 Corinthians 3:15, 4:5, Romans 2:16, Revelation 20:12).

In Daniel 7:9, the prophet describes a vision of the Ancient of Days, which is a term that literally means Mover of Days (this Aramaic verb also appears in the Talmudic term "He who moves the world," which implies a lengthy and perpetual solar process; hence "ancient"; days come from earth's rotation, so the "end of days" comes with lift-off from earth). Daniel describes the robe of the Ancient of Days as white and His hair as pure wool (also see Revelation 1:14-16), which is an image that obviously draws from the stellar cosmos: the Milky Way of stars, with stars being the human righteous ones (compare Genesis 15:5 to Daniel 12:3 and Matthew 2:10 to Philippians 2:15; the Greek term for the Milky Way combines γαλα, gala, and κυκλος, kuklos, circle; see for "Way" our article on οδος, hodos). That means that Daniel's vision follows the structure of the Creation Week, and most specifically days 1 and 4 (compare Genesis 1:16 to Isaiah 9:2 and Matthew 4:16).

The general rule is that the sun is gold (χρυσος, chrusos) and the stars are silver (αργυρος, arguros, silver or white). The moon, as pseudo-sun, is bronze (χαλκος, chalkos). The stars without the solar corona are iron (σιδηρος, sideros).

Experiencing one's own solar eclipse while being wide awake is rather unnerving to the untrained. But as Jesus said: "For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father" (John 10:18).

When God cuts the covenant with Abraham, of which Jesus will be the final fulfilment (Galatians 3:16), God takes Abraham outside and says, "Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them" (Genesis 15:5). What is not often emphasized is that the sun sets only in Genesis 15:12. That means that Abraham's star-scene happens during the bright of day and Abraham can't count the stars because he can't see any (just like he can't see his future son). His celebrated faith and reckoned righteousness (15:6) is contingent on his understanding that during the day, the stars are there just as much as during the night; they're merely invisible because they are drowned out by the sunlight. But they are there and never stop being there.

Much later, an unnamed servant of Elisha (who was the successor of Elijah) panics as he sees the horses and chariots of the Aramean army surrounding Dothan. Elisha responds, "Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them." Then YHWH opens the servant's eyes, who promptly sees the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha (2 Kings 6:13-17).

In Psalm 45, we read about the glorious king of righteousness, whose bride and daughter-of-royalty (45:13) approaches him and enters his private quarters. Then sons appear: princes in all the earth (Genesis 1:15), who uphold the memory of the king's name (Psalm 45:16-17).

Entirely likewise, when Jesus is crucified on Golgotha, darkness falls upon the land (Matthew 27:45), as by some he is heard calling for Elijah. Then rocks split and tombs open and out comes a multitude of saints alive and well (Matthew 27:52-53, see 1 Corinthians 6:2).

The proverbial death of self (John 12:24), the resurrection (Philippians 3:10-11), one's second birth (John 3:3), the unity of the saints (John 17:21-24, Ephesians 4:3-6); all of it refers to one's ability to self-eclipse one's own ratio, and have one's mind enlightened by the multitudes of stars of one's community.

The prophet Isaiah thunders: "If they do not speak according to this word, it is because they have no שחר (shahar)!" (Isaiah 8:20), and although traditional commentators translate this word with dawn, here at Abarim Publications we are pretty sure it means solar eclipse — see our dictionary article for a lengthy look at this word's usage in the Bible: it derives from the identical verb שחר (shahar), meaning to be black or darkened.

Psalm 22 is called the Psalm of the Cross. While dying, Jesus referred to this magnificent poem by quoting its opening line (ελωι ελωι λαμμα σαβαχθανι, eloi, eloi, lamma sabachthani), because of which certain people thought he was called for Elijah. Better informed folks knew that Psalm 22 was dedicated to אילת השחר ('ayilot hashahar), which means She Who Protrudes Onto Shahar or She Who Eases Forward Until She Reaches Solar Eclipse.

So, what about those left behind?

After ten thousand wonderful years, the shepherds are about to bid farewell to their domesticated animal friends: the ox and horse have long been replaced by tractors and cars, and wool too is getting the boot. After ten millennia of codependency, modern man has developed enough machines, synthetic materials and plant equivalents to completely replace all products from and service by domesticated animals. The shepherds are headed toward the stars, and with the possible exception of the occasional beagle, won't take any animals along. Governing earthlings will probably keep some sheep for kids to pet, but the rest of earth will become a huge wildlife park.

Prior to the agricultural revolution, all large animals were roughly equally intelligent. But during the farming era, we problem-solving naked apes developed upward and became vastly more intelligent, whereas animals like sheep, having nothing to fear and no troubles to overcome, developed downward and became vastly more daft. Consequently, modern "human" animals like wooly sheep and milk cows can't survive in the wild, so whatever exists on farms today will have to remain there. Humane and grateful as ever, the shepherds aren't going to simply euthanize their flocks, but will allow them to live out their natural lives in a heavenly environment of perfect bliss. Like Noah's Ark and Rick's Café, the animals will gather willingly and joyfully, thinking they are marching toward their eternal salvation, while in fact they are walking onto their final demise.

Some insist that we should warn the sheep, but that's easier said than done. Sheep are remarkably clever; many have PhDs and teach at universities and are on TV all the time, explaining things. And most sheep only know sheep and don't realize that they are just one of many species. And most sheep think that sheep run the planet, and that ancient sheep built it all, and that modern sheep should therefor inherit it.

In our modern 2020s, the sheep have started building their own version of heaven: a wonderful place without any challenges, where everything not-sheep is simply deleted, and all food is glorious sheep-food. But domesticated animals aren't equipped for independent existence, which means that they have a suicide function built in. If the shepherds don't keep them from it, legions of domesticated herds will follow each other down the path of least resistance and plunge en masse into the abyss.

What he sheep are not equipped to realize is that their sheep-heaven, which they have merrily dubbed the Metaverse, is what the shepherds call Sheol. For more on why sheep-heaven is actually a fabulously effective death trap, see our article on Apollyon.

Final boarding call

Before humans had language, there was no way to tell any particular difference between them and other animals. Humans were just one socially inclined creature among many, and there was no sign whatsoever that would indicate that we naked apes had any sort of advantage over the much faster horses, the stronger buffalo, the more valiant lions or the more massive bears.

Long before their celebrated alliance with the canines, the naked apes had figured out that prowling predators compacted the herds, and victims fell on the periphery and not at the heart of it. That means that the agricultural revolution probably began when clusters of naked apes began to hide at the center of massive herds, and began to look for ways to keep their sheltering herds together and in one place.

This also suggests that when small groups of naked apes had begun to develop speech, most others were sitting among the sheep, bleating along with them, trying to convince themselves and everybody else that they too were sheep.

The effort of modern evangelists like us here at Abarim Publications is not to convert sheep, but to call out the last remaining naked apes from among them.

The language that we use for that is not a regular language that consists of words, but an imaginary language that consists of mental images (see our article on the verb δοκεω, dokeo, to image). Our message, therefore, is not simply a single story or statement or theory, but rather a full medium in which any story whatsoever can be told. We send our message out and wait for a reaction. The difference between a sheep and a fellow ape is that sheep repeat but apes respond. It usually takes a while but when the response becomes conversation, we draw our fellow apes out of sheepdom and into apedom. And there's nothing like watching an ape shed their silly sheepskin and come home (Luke 15:7).

The Bible is not like a Harry Potter or Moby Dick. It's not a deliberate production by one or a handful of authors, but was formed organically by a countless multitude; a human smart-swarm. The Bible looks like a book the way a human looks like an ape, and to observers that don't know any better, books and apes is all there is.

To observers that do, humans are city builders, and the Bible is like a city whose streets were worn smooth (Matthew 3:3) by the feet of many travelers who all followed the voice they all heard in their own hearts (John 10:27). It was produced, perfected and maintained by the forces of the open commercial market: the same global forces of supply and demand that made us forget the writings of Julius Caesar but preserve those of Isaiah.

The Bible is what some call the Arkenstone, the heart of the mountain. It's a multi-dimensional fractal matrix and a perfect representation of the universe at large. It's both the story of Everything, and the environment in which every story that can be told will be told. The Bible provides a series of archetypes from which every item, every event and every living thing can be spun.

The Bible is software, whose purpose it is to compensate for the failings of our ignorant modern languages. If we were born among the sheep, but our parents taught us the Bible well enough for us to think in its images (Psalm 89:15), we are not sheep but naked apes hiding among the sheep in sheep's clothing. And over the mindless bleating of our peers, we hear the song sung in its language as it wafts from the mountains and through the valleys.

The presence of God in the world can be recognized from the harmonic Oneness of all things (compare Romans 1:20 to 2 Peter 1:4). In the Metaverse, users make their own reality, which means that the harmonic Oneness of all things is compromised, and that means that in the Metaverse, God cannot be found (Psalm 88:5). Today, platforms like Facebook are the source of very serious psychological problems among mostly young people. But that's just child's play compared to what's coming.

The total-immersive Metaverse is a blue-pill rip-off of the real stellar mind, which indeed is a manifestation of the Oneness of all things. Modern humanity has become what it is because humans have always found ways to work together with everything that came their way, to bridge whatever chasm and combine the incompatible. The core quality of humanity is adaptability: the self-sacrificial curtailment of the bristly-self in order to be able to better bond with the very-other, so as to make a greater-One.

Stellar consciousness is shaped like an Ω (omega; hence too SS Enterprise), whereas solar consciousness is shaped like an Ο (omicron). Stellar consciousness is the base of all cooperation, all language, all society, all law and all fulfilment of law and thus all love and all liberty. Solar consciousness is the base of all tyranny and oppression, all empire and slavery, all darkness and central legislation.

The mother of all folly is the idea that super-humanity comes not from finding harmony in diversity but from identifying the contaminants and destroying them. To people that can't resist its fascistic lures, the Metaverse is social porn that kills the spirit and leads back to animal reality. Great apes will not submit to the Metaverse or even live within it but use it freely and handle it wisely, albeit only as a tool that helps the saints unite with all life in an ever greater cosmos.