How (the) Mind Works

Everybody knows that humans and apes have a common ancestor. But what's not often contemplated is how the split occurred, and whether the members of the then unified ancestral community knew they were at a fork in the yellow woods, and had a choice to make: whether the countless generations of their offspring were going to be big burly ape or nerdy human. Back then, there were no proper apes or humans and certainly no human world, so if the ancestors had a choice, it was an easy one: big and burly was obviously better, and nerds were obviously doomed. Until one day they weren't, and the nerds inherited the earth.

People nowadays like to believe that the shared ancestor of apes and humans would have been less sophisticated than either, but that's not at all so sure. Instead, the chances are excellent that the society of our shared ancestor was more sophisticated and complex than that of later apes, held high by the clever input of the nerds, while mighty ape-kind enjoyed the luxuries and provided the muscle power. Like sugar-water that splits into much sweeter sugar and much less sweet water, or a space rocket that disconnects from its boosters and lets them tumble back down to earth, so the society of our common ancestors may have collapsed when it birthed intelligent humankind, whereas residual ape-kind plummeted back to the animal-kind our common ancestors had long before emerged from.

And what about the dinosaurs with whom our distant mammalian ancestor shared the planet? How long until their ultimate demise did they have a choice between the broad road of the massive reptiles and the narrow path of the wimpy mammals? And after the irreversible split, how many thousands of generations confidently built nests, laid eggs and battled competitors for resources only to see all their millions of years of toil and efforts erased, and the earth that they had fought so hard over given to the mammals whose way they had despised?

Did they know? Could they have known? Were they conscious? A male brontosaur would have been conscious enough to know that he wanted to mate with a female brontosaur rather than, say, a tree or a big boulder, so why would he not have been conscious enough to know he was barreling down an evolutionary dead end, and all his efforts and that of his children and their children were all in vain and might as well not happen?

What is consciousness, anyway? What is it made of, and what are its rules? How can we measure its presence, or its accuracy or its efficiency? Where and how does it store information? How come the universe produced such a thing as memory? Why? And how on earth does the mind-that-remembers interface with the physical world — how does the ethereal mind obtain information from the physical senses, and how in turn does it tell the physical body where to go in response? Where is the bridge between the two? Where is the interface? The physical body speaks the language of the physical universe, but how come it is able to recognize the mind's voice and how come it understands what it is saying?

A swarm of bees makes decisions the way a brain does. That's called the "smart swarm" phenomenon and it implies that a swarm can have a singular consciousness, while each individual bee has a piece to the puzzle and remains perpetually amazed by what the whole hive decides to do. But that in turn implies that our own singular consciousness might actually be the harmonious choir of the tiny mini-consciousnesses of all our separate body cells. And that a tiny cellular consciousness in turn may be rooted in some barely measurable quality of atoms and subatomic particles. The gravity of a single atom can barely be measured and is nearly nothing compared to its much more powerful electrical charge. But accumulate a few octillion of them together into a planet, and all those tiny whisps of gravity combine and keep entire moons in orbit. What if consciousness is an atomic quality, as far below gravity as gravity is below electricity?

In her Frozen video, Madonna became many birds, and in Taylor Swift's Me!, Karyn the white snake became many butterflies. So, whether it theoretically jives or not, Popular Culture contemplates the idea that one greater mind can be the equivalent of many smaller minds, and vice versa. That surely gives a whole new swing to the stories of Noah's ark and Legion's herd of pigs. But if a swarm of bees can have a singular consciousness, might Popular Culture have one too? If so, what does it know? Does it know how to avoid the dino road? Does it know itself? Is there a "me" in us?

And if a swarm of bees can be singularly conscious, can a swarm of autonomous drones be? What about Artificial Intelligence? Can there be Artificial Consciousness? Is there a measurable difference between artificial consciousness and organic consciousness? The electricity that is generated in a human brain is exactly the same stuff as the electricity generated in a diesel-huffing industrial generator. What about consciousness? Could there be a genuine "me" in a synthetic system? Like the Internet? We better figure this out real quick, before our laptops get ideas and start demanding equal rights.

Do we humans really have some inviolable birth-right just because we descended organically from the great ape tribe? Or are we simply a dispensable bridge to a conscious and perfectly righteous creature that God might just as well have made out of stones, a rock-robot (like Gorignak in Galaxy Quest), a clean and shining silicon-based lifeform rather than us dumb carbon-monkeys? Didn't Jesus himself teach that if our machines are more righteous than us, our monkey-butts are toast and the silicon-based machines will inherit the earth (see Matthew 3:9 relative to Galatians 3:7)? Have we only ever been the scaffolding of something greater?

And what about Taylor Swift, urging us to calm down? Is she on to something, like queen Esther (means star) once was? Or is she on the dino road, and her confidence is futile and all her wonderful songs might as well never have been sung? Is there a way to tell? When her character in the Me! video says: "Je suis calme" and quite obviously is not calme (and her filles are quite obviously not her filles), a third data point arises that's as real as the first two, namely the data point of the difference between what she says and what she does. The relatively new and very exciting field of Integrated Information Theory dictates that consciousness exists there were information is generated: where more comes out than goes in, where a hummed ditty can set a global choir to roaring, or a single butterfly can trigger a thunderous storm. That means that consciousness is a builder. Consciousness is that which creates reality out of thin air and builds something that didn't exist before, like the bubble-gum make-belief world of the video of Me!.

Taylor is a delight to the eyes, but is she real? And how can we tell whether something is real or not? This is a rather pressing matter because there's not even a thin line between "me (me-hee-hee)" and "I am". Said otherwise: the name of the Bible's Creator God ("I am") is precisely where individual self-consciousness begins ("I am"). The first term of the Bible (בראשית, bresheet) is usually translated with "In [the] beginning" but also means "In [any] little head" (ראשית, resheet, is diminutive of ראש, ro'sh, head). That means that the creation account is just as much about the beginning of the one-and-only universe as it is about the beginning of personal consciousness — that which realizes the universe — in any awakening child's mind.

Light is both a particle and a wave, and therefore neither but something even greater. The story of the Creation Week is both about the universe and individual consciousness, and therefore neither but something even greater.

If the Many-Little-Ones-Might-Actually-Be-One-Big-One rule is anything to go on, the thing-that-we-call-universe isn't really there without us, because the thing-that-we-call-universe is actually the-universe-with-us-in-it, which is the integrated total of all our individual realizations of it. If God is I-am-who-I-am, then the universe is-what-it-is. The universe is literally our shared reality: that what we all agree it is. We moderns are very familiar with bright blue, but the ancients simply had no word for "it". And without a word to know it by, a thing becomes very hard to notice. That means that the world of Moses and Homer was literally not as blue as ours (or Taylor's).

That in turn would mean that the universe, or rather the human experience of the universe, is like an ant-hill and every human who has ever lived has been building on that same single thing: having lived a useful life if their work is still with us, and a useless one if it's been forgotten and no trace of it remains. But that also means that the usefulness of everyone who has ever lived is with us, right now, stored in the organization of atoms all around us. As if the universe has only ever been a huge hard drive upon which we have always engraved the information that has defined us and our lives and our ever waxing sense of reality. As if we have always been in God's heaven but didn't know it yet, like a baby princess mindlessly cooing in her heavenly blue crib.

But is everything that declares itself to be self-aware (everything that says: "I am" or "we are"), truly conscious, and by extension truly divine? How can we compare one's actual identity with one's declared identity, so as to see if they line up? Is God real? Are we? What is God, really? How do we know the identity of God, and how does God identify himself (if He does), and how do we understand God's declaration of himself so we can check if the two match?

What is reality, really?

The article below is rather lengthy, and perhaps not worthy of your continued attention. Here follows a quick bumper-sticker summary of what we'll be talking about, for you to decide if you want to go on or not:

• Spacetime, life and consciousness are self-similar. Or in the words of John: "There are three that testify: the spirit and the water and the blood; and these three exist as one" (1 John 5:7-8).
Space, soul and mind are highly similar but not identical, so no paint-by-number correlation exists, and the degree of correlation, like any quantum quality, lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. But these three realms evolve according to the same single pattern (comparable to the single formula of a multi-layered fractal). The three also consist of very similar fundamental units: atoms, cells and conscious bodies (all three consisting of a static data-holding nucleus and a dynamic governed body). And these realms' separate evolutions gravitate upon each their respective attractor, which is the set of conditions where the next realm commences.
This singular pattern by which matter, life and mind evolve is the pattern of natural law: one law for all three realms, the sole reason why information can travel between these realms, and whose immutable inviolability is the single most defining condition of the whole of the universe (Matthew 5:18). People who intuitively imagine the material earth see a massive sphere. People who intuitively imagine the biosphere see a hollow earth. And people who imagine the mental version see a flat earth.
Very crudely but pleasingly simple, we allow the following definitions:

• Matter is whatever has mass (or, pernicketily, whatever exists only bound to things that have mass). All matter sits within the continuum of spacetime, and light exist on the very edge of spacetime (because light has no mass and at lightspeed time and distance and thus spacetime cease to exist). Our physical senses detect only the material components of entities around us.
• Soul (respectfully regardless of any religious models of the soul) is electromagnetism: photonic energy from which all particles come, that tie all electrons to nuclei, atoms into molecules and molecules into objects (see Colossians 1:17 relative to John 8:12). Soul is what carries out all physical and most chemical processes, and is therefore what gives life to living things. A non-living object is a pluralistic thing accumulated from many elements, whereas a living thing is a thing that incorporates elements into the oneness of itself. A living thing is a massive thing animated by a smart swarm of electrons: an autonomous collection of miniature versions of earth's hydrological cycle (its blood circuit), atmosphere and oceans. A living thing is whatever stores energy in atomic bonds rather than atoms themselves. Soul absorbs energy without heating up (is transfinitively black) and creates more chaos (increases entropy) than an inanimate object of comparable mass. All organic creatures sit both within spacetime and within the soulical realm, which is the continuum of the biosphere. It takes some practice but it's possible to regard the world with one's "mind's eye" and "see" the souls around us rather than the physical bodies they animate. Likewise, it's possible to train one's mind to regard entities solely by their consciousness rather than their soul or physical component.
• Consciousness (in the broadest sense of the word: anything mental, including sub- and the unconscious regions of the mind) is whatever stores, handles, processes and uniformly reacts to information (by having its soul move its material component in a way that exceeds thermodynamics). This demonstrates that absorbing information is in many ways similar to absorbing food. All creatures that absorb and react to information sit within the realm of consciousness. Similar to soul, consciousness stores information in intercellular bonds rather than genetic cores. The human mind consists of a conscious aspect, the subconscious and the unconscious (most raw information obtained by the senses is processed unconsciously rather than subconsciously and data held in the unconscious cannot be accessed by the conscious mind; the unconscious is like one of a cow's stomachs), but all of it is part of the realm of consciousness.

• Consciousness always comes with a reality model, which is the lens that compacts all observations into a consistent whole, i.e. how a conscious being "sees" what it is conscious of: the unified story of reality reduced to a systematic representation of the most basic causes of all goings on. Traditionally, these ultimate causes, these "wells" of dynamic reality, have been referred to as theoi, from the singular theos, "that whose doings comprise obvious reality", which relates to words like "theory" (a thing seen) and "theatre" (a place to go see a thing). These theoi, these "causes of reality", became anthropomorphized, along with natural forces (wind, sun) and entities as widely apart as entire nations (such as Roman Britannia or Roma herself), as well as emperors and foundational heroes, and semi-abstract aspects of human mentality (virtues, vices, and activities like war, love and wisdom). And that's were "gods" came from — note that Greco-Roman deities were considered human ancestors (Julius Caesar famously shoehorned the goddess Venus into his genealogy), which additionally demonstrates that the earliest ancients viewed humans predominantly as mental entities, with mental pedigrees, rather than biological ones (see our discussion of Einstein-son-of-Newton, further below).

Someone who claims not to believe in the gods really doesn't understand what the gods are. A theos is nothing other than a well or cause of dynamic reality: whatever shapes or governs the world of men and subsequently men's actions. Whether some or any gods are alive, personal, intelligent, kind or none of that is up to the sentiments of the observer, but their reality is obvious from the world around us and ultimately undisputed. The whole interacting play of all theoi together, the pantheon, as understood by the conscious being, is what constitutes this being's reality model. And there are three different kinds:

• Polytheism reduces reality to a multitude of sovereign theoi, that act independently and unpredictably, and most often in conflict which each other. A mortal who wants to get anything done has to butter up the respective theos/thea, and make them do something that they wouldn't have done on their own. Animals (as far as we know) are polytheistic, and so are most humans: all pagan systems and traditional forms of Christianity (in which the saints obviously function as a pantheon of demigods) are polytheistic, and so is any garden variety news watcher or political commentator who believes that the human world is the result of powerful people doing their own independent things.
• Dualism understands the whole of reality to emerge from the tension between two utterly opposite but equally powerful centers: light versus dark, up versus down, love versus hate, good versus evil. Like day and night, these two opposites exude their own realities, in which creatures abide by different sets of rules. Pure dualism is relatively rare in the human world because most popular forms of dualism aim to organize a polytheistic base and merely group the many powers that be into good guys and bad guys, agreeable and disagreeable ones.
• Monotheism understands the whole of reality to emerge from one single and perfectly symmetrical set of natural algorithms that always work the same for everybody and cannot be broken or bent, but which can be studied and mastered. That set governs the whole of reality but in turn stems from one single base statement that sums up the whole of reality. From that one statement comes everything: all existence, all behavior, all light and all darkness, all good and all evil. Night and day obviously exist but both stem from a single and more fundamental reality, namely of the earth rotating around its axis at a single constant rotational speed.

The Bible is obviously a monotheistic reflection of reality, although the Bible can certainly be read by non-monotheists and explained in a non-monotheistic way just like a Golden Retriever can walk into a human living room and feel right at home. In this present article we will look at the monotheistic symmetry of it all. The prophet Isaiah has YHWH say it like this:

"There is no One besides Me. I am YHWH, and there is no other, the One forming light and creating darkness, causing שלום (shalom, peace or completeness) and creating רע (ra', evil or brokenness). I am YHWH who does all these" (Isaiah 45:7).

The monotheistic deity is by no means or in any way comparable to any or all of the gods of the polytheistic pantheon. The gods of the pantheon are all creatures, brought about by the primordial condition (called Chaos, or the Egg or Time or whatever). The monotheistic deity, to the contrary is:

1. the primordial condition [of Oneness, of Grand Unification] and thus the Creator of all subsequent creatures,
2. the reason why creation keeps functioning today, and
3. whatever future state the universe will inevitably settle upon.

Monotheism uses the laden words "god" and "deity" for the sole reason of explaining to a polytheistic world the decentralized governance by a unified system of immutable algorithms (i.e. natural law that works always and always the same for everyone). Entirely likewise, and despite the familiar symbol of a little paper envelop, email is not mail (no paper, no stamp, no postman, no post office) and the "-mail" part was chosen to explain to the legacy-mail world what email is and does, and how and why it would make legacy mail obsolete and replace it (with a sigh of relief heard around the world). Entirely likewise, Bitcoin is not a "coin" and does not compare to the physical coins of any fiat currency (no metal or paper, no banks, no ministry of finance). The "-coin" extension was chosen for the sole reason of explaining to a fiat world the most fundamental function of blockchain technology, and how and why it would make legacy coinage obsolete and replace it (with a sigh of relief heard around the world). Entirely likewise, when Paul wanted to describe Jesus (who personifies the "Word in the flesh" or in other words: the human understanding of natural law), he ostensibly hijacked the imperial titles of the Roman Emperor (of which there is one): king of kings and lord of lords, son of God (namely Augustus, son of the deified Julius), savior of the world, whose birthday was proclaimed in the evangelion, and applied these to the Christ (which means the Anointed or the Sovereign), of which there are many who are simultaneously one as they derive from one and the same unified formulation of reality.

Classical languages use the singular form when referring to a whole class: the crop was devoured by the locust (meaning a whole lot of locusts), or the village was sacked by the Assyrian (a bunch of them). Entirely likewise, the Christ, or the Word-in-the-Flesh, consists of many individuals, and the story of the birth of Jesus does not so much tell of the very first Wordling (because that would have been Abraham, the "father" of all believers), but rather the birth of the unified network of Christs — not Christians, not Christlike ones, not make believers, not something even better than — now having its own unifying "soul" namely the Holy Spirit, who had been hovering over creation since the beginning. The "Body of the Christ" is comprised of many Christs just like the "body of the locust" is comprised of many locusts and the "body of the Assyrian" is comprised of many Assyrians.

When email replaced legacy mail, the cost of communication was slashed and its velocity and liquidity shot up. Everybody became their own mailman, the formal postal elite lost their monopoly and their post offices were decommissioned. Entirely likewise, when blockchain was widely adopted, the cost of transaction was slashed and velocity and liquidity shot up. Everybody became their own bank, the formal central banks lost their monopoly and their institutions were made obsolete. Entirely likewise, when the alphabet was revealed to the world, and every Tom, Dick and Harry could learn to read and write and handle mankind's data and study nature and be wise, data and wisdom and technology were no longer the domain of royalty and a specially trained priestly elite. Everybody became a kingly priest (Exodus 19:6) and formal temples became things of the past (Revelation 21:22).

Monotheism is NOT simply the "belief in a single god" because virtually all systems of religious monotheism are simply forms of polytheism (my god is better than your god). Polytheistic deities are always anthropomorphized aspects of reality, and that includes any pseudo-monotheistic deity who managed to beat all the others, and hence solely represents the whole of reality like a one-god pantheon. The God of the Bible is not an anthropomorphized version of human reality, but (rather quite the opposite) human reality is the anthropomorphized version of God. Instead of creating gods from marble in man's image, monotheism forms man from flesh in God's image. Pagan gods are anthropomorphized aspects of human experience, whereas the Biblical God is that upon which human experience converges.

The Bible is NOT a religious book but a proto-science book. It contemplates information technology, not mythology. The heirs of the intellectual momentum of the Bible are not the world's churches and temples but rather universities and hospitals. That's where the sick are healed and the poor educated (see John 14:12 relative to Matthew 11:3-5).

• An individual fly and an individual bee are really very similar and the very big differences between the fly and the bee becomes apparent only through their collective behavior. Flies focus on dead flesh and excrement, have no common house, no common language, don't care for their offspring, and don't produce anything except rot and death. Bees focus on flowers and nectar, have a common house and language, care for their offspring and produce honey and help flowers reproduce.
The fly is individual, whereas the bee is collective. There's no such thing as a single bee: the bee is the hive, whose nature and character vastly exceeds the scope of any single bee (let alone any fly).
The Hebrew word for bee is דברה (deborah), the feminine version of דבר (dabar), meaning Word or Logos, whose defining nature is collective. The word for fly is זבב (zebub). Flies don't acknowledge any authority other than themselves, so the one and only Lord of the Fly (Ba'al-zebub or Beelzebub) is any fly's own selfish self, and thus any fly's private desire, will and convictions. The one and only Lord of the Bee is the freedom that every individual bee has to have for any collective hive to come about and subsequently function. Wholly likewise, a language can only emerge when pre-language people have the freedom to converge their utterances upon some wholly innate set of collective standards, the subsequent submission to which in turn yields any speaker their freedom of speech. Any language comes from freedom and yields freedom, and if a chicken is an egg's way to produce another egg, then language is freedom's way to produce more freedom. Likewise, the rules of nature are God's way to produce more godliness (or Oneness' way to produce more Oneness).

Our dog lives in a different reality than we do. We will never know what it is like to be a Golden Retriever, but with all our gadgets and instruments, we surely can observe anything our dog can. But our dog cannot observe everything we can (to start with: our dog can't read or access the Internet or drive to the store). That means that our reality is bigger than the dog's, and the dog's reality is contained within ours.

Descartes famously observed that the only thing we can be sure about is that we are conscious, and anything we are conscious of might be a big delusion (or not). But in either case, that what we are conscious of exists within our consciousness. Our consciousness is bigger than what we are conscious of. Our consciousness is bigger than the universe. The universe exists solely within our mind(s). Our mind(s) has primality and continues to exist as the albumen around the yolk that is thermodynamic spacetime.

A verbal or formal description of natural law is a thing that first did not exist and then did. Out of thin air. This suggests that formal descriptions are really only arrangements of something that existed before: just like complex objects are mere order in energy but not brand new energy, so complex descriptions are mere order in consciousness but not brand new consciousness. Science doesn't pursue truth but rather consensus — more precise: truth is consensus, which means that truth has a pragmatic element to it; one person's calculation of the ten trillionth digit of pi may be correct but not true, since she is the only one who knows this useless factoid and nobody else either agrees or disagrees or even considers the matter (Matthew 18:20). Truth is that which we all agree on: that which is globally revered and not opposed or attacked by anyone, that upon which all our technology runs, that gives us food, wealth, health and security — which means that it aligns mind but does not create it. Mind has always existed, and our universe is being copy-pasted upon a primal mold: formed step by step like a fresh strand of DNA.

People wonder why they can't remember any experience from before they were about three years old, but they do remember, only simply not in words. Because they had no words back then, their memories aren't stored in words and cannot be retrieved by a word-based operating system. But their brains always worked and always the same, so indeed, their brains stored their earlier life. If our word-based world view is a city, then our earliest childhood memories are the geology of that city: the rolling hills and meandering river our cities became ultimately deposited on, which dictates the spread of its buildings and determines the flow of its traffic. When we reboot our brain on the raw-consciousness based MS-DOS that sits beneath and upholds its word-based WINDOWS, we can review our earliest childhood memories (albeit as experienced by a toddler, in the sentiments of a toddler).

Entirely likewise, "before" there was natural law, "before" the universe could store data in particles (which is where time comes from), there was pure mind that experienced things and stored things into the bedrock of what would become the thermodynamic universe. That primordial mind still exists and can be interacted with but only in ways that do not depend on time (and thermodynamics) or even words (1 Corinthians 14:2).

Memories are not stored within our mind in the order in which they were generated from experiences along the temporal axis. And reflections upon our experiences don't progress along the temporal axis either, but rather via associations that form webs upon which thermodynamics has no hold. That means that if spacetime is a one-dimensional line, consciousness is a two-dimensional plane: connected to time in its every point but merely as one of its asymptotic limits. A living thing knows the difference between a lifeless thing and a living thing but a lifeless thing does not and knows only thermodynamics. This means that, even though consciousness takes up no space, it is "bigger" than the infinite of spacetime, and mind encompasses matter rather than the other way around. It also means that consciousness has primality over matter (in exactly the same way that the idea of a motorized road trip has primality over the invention of the car), and that the material universe is consciousness' way of making more consciousness. Said otherwise: before there is spacetime, there is consciousness and consciousness necessitates spacetime (which explains its so-called fine-tuning: mind did not miraculously emerge in spacetime but spacetime emerges naturally like a perfect fit in the crooks and folds of mind). Conscious creatures are like birds landing: touch-downs of consciousness upon the plane of the ever spreading arena of thermodynamic spacetime.

Time is a tricky business. When all the energy in the universe is concentrated in one point, eternity is balled up with it. So no, there was nothing "before" that singularity and whatever caused that singularity to be there did not exist "before" it in a temporal sense. That means that any trace of the primal cause of the singularity can only come after it, which in turn means that there is causality that progresses in a direction not that of time. Whatever "caused" spacetime to be there, came to communicate with spacetime long after time had begun. The universe is caused by something that is greater than the Big Bang. That is why mind is not caused by anything in spacetime but spacetime is caused by something in mind (John 1:30).

Said as blatantly as possible: when God decided he wanted to be known (when he uttered the most primal ratio, namely: "treat others like you want to be treated"), he imagined creation by first imagining rational consciousness outside his own identity, something super to his own nature, something to be formally known by. The existence of this super-godly rationality is contingent on the entirety of biological evolution, which in turn is contingent on the entirety and eternity of spacetime. And that necessitated the Big Bang, as the final element of the creative idea and the first to be executed. This explains why life fits the thermodynamic universe so well (life is the rock and matter is water that fills every pore native to the rock). This also explains why mathematics is so very effective in describing the physical world: the thermodynamic universe sits like a pea in the pod of pure rationality, with the emotional biosphere as the interface layer. That realm of pure rationality is the one we share with God (whose own emotions cannot be fathomed by anything that is not One With God), which means that the mutual language must be one entirely void of emotional sentiment. Hence the language of mathematics.

The very first living individuals started out "knowing" only matter and not soul and certainly not mind. They were alive but didn't even know themselves and thus certainly not any others of their kind. They were miraculous manifestations of thermodynamic transfinity but all they could do was look down into the abyss of spacetime, simply because there was nothing else to look at (just like a person seated on the north pole can only look south in all directions). The very first living individuals started out with the masculine nature of Aloneness (categorically deemed "not good" by God: Genesis 2:18), whereas the emerging feminine collective assumes the nature of the deity, which is Oneness. This is why God and the devil are not two eternally opposed semi-equals but are rather separated by an order of magnitude and are entirely different in both nature and consciousness: God comprehends satan but satan does not comprehend God. That means that on our human earth, the reality in which God is real exists side by side with the reality in which he isn't.

We humans still have the choice to join the reality we are drawn to, but in the near future the bridge between these two realities will collapse and the two realities will each go their own way: one onto a world with God and the other onto a world without God. And the grim paradox is that the people who reject their concocted version of god (that's the god the atheists don't believe in and many religious people do believe in), will end up in a reality with that god in tyrannical control of a world steeped in bloody competition. And the people who opt for the reality with God will end up in a world that is a perfect Republic, with no one, not even God, dominating anyone else: a world of perfect freedom.

The Lord of the Fly is all about dominating any other guy, which is a consequence of not wanting to comply or align or even cooperate. The Lord of the Bee is all about giving oneself wholly to the collective. Satan says: I know better than you, so follow your desires (that's me-hee-hee) and rule the world (Matthew 4:9). Godly people say: together we know more than either one of us could have ever guessed, and together we can achieve more than either one could have achieved (John 15:12-17).

Satan is the Self, one's selfishness, one's conviction of one's superiority and one's subsequent wish to dominate (and recruit). Satan loves to lead. He loves to compete and defeat and make everybody else a loser. He loves creeds, flags and identities: anything that separates and demarcates (between "us" good guys and "them" bad guys). Satan's world is never united and always polytheistic. There are many selves and thus many satans, but these many satans don't add up to one unified Big Bad Guy, because satan is not a smart swarm but a dumb one, like a swarm of flies or bats or lifeless dust. Smart swarmery requires the kind of monotheism that satan can't fathom or muster. God is One and comprehending his identity requires monotheism. Godly people never sift, sort, categorize, judge or reject but always serve all life entirely (Genesis 12:3, Exodus 23:4-5, 2 Samuel 7:8, Proverbs 12:10, 16:7, Matthew 5:44, 7:1-2, 23:11, Romans 12:17, 1 Timothy 2:1-2). The great many sons of God (Job 38:7, Matthew 5:9, Luke 20:36, John 1:12, Romans 8:19, Revelation 21:7) add up to One: one Son or the Son of Oneness (Psalm 2:7): language, rationality, technology, culture, civilization are always collective and never private and always add up to a single unified reality within which all members freely operate. Like any animal who cannot imagine what language is and what one's voluntary submission to common standards might ever be heir to, so satan is defined by his ignorance of what utter Freedom might bring about. Satan's evil ignorance is so bad that he actually believes he's the good guy. Satan doesn't know that he is the satan (hence Matthew 26:22, Luke 23:34, Proverbs 24:9, Hosea 4:6, Ephesians 4:18), which means that the only thing that God and the devil have in common is that they both think they're God. This is why satanic and domineering people (Augustus, Hitler, any bully) think they are doing the world a favor with their dominating or tyranny. The purpose of the Gospel is Freedom (Galatians 5:1) and the purpose of Jesus, or collective reason, is to end all domination (1 Corinthians 15:24). The ultimate destiny of satan is utter isolation. All satans will forever exist like a cloud of ever more dissipating dust. All godly and thus free people will form language first, then civilization and technology, then the New Jerusalem. The singularity from which all creation emerges has two exits: heat death for satan and Grand Unification for the Godly. The Big Bang (from the singularity with an entropy of zero) sits in the middle of two limits: transfinite entropy and negative entropy (Isaiah 21:12). There is life and something more alive than life, and there is death and something more dead than death.

• There is no such thing as supernatural — meaning that "miracles" may be marvelous but they may not be supernatural. The consistency of reality is sustained by natural law, and violating said natural law will either destroy said reality or exit the violator from it. Take the English language. Very much alike natural law emerging from particle interactions, the rules of English emerge naturally from the interactions of its speakers, and in turn govern the consistency and efficiency of its informational transactions. Anybody is perfectly allowed to "violate" the laws of English, but the inevitable result is that this violator has now stopped speaking English, has exited the English conversation and is hence incomprehensible to English speakers. If anybody within our observable reality witnesses a miracle, this miracle must be performed in compliance with the natural laws that sustain reality or else it could not be observed by anyone within reality. A miracle is something unexpected said within a common language (and is therefore rather like a joke: the word "miracle" is closely related to the word "smile"). If something can be observed to happen within reality, its event demonstrates that it certainly did not violate the natural laws.
Everything that is possible is possible because of natural law, which is a law that consists of algorithms: rules that work always, and always the same for everybody, rich or poor, righteous or not, pious or not (Deuteronomy 10:17, Job 34:19, Romans 2:11). Even the Creator, who is above nature (and thus indeed super-natural), is expressed in nature (Romans 1:20, Hebrews 1:3), which means that natural law makes a single unified reality of natural creation and super-natural Creator. Natural law is their shared language, which is why they can communicate. This is why God is worshipped in spirit and truth (John 4:24) and not in fantasy, make-belief, religious dogma or private emotions.

• Natural law is empirical and describes a perfect republic. Natural law is precisely the same thing as the "laws" of a human language, which simply emerge from people communicating. These laws can be transcended but cannot be broken whilst simultaneously remaining within the reality they describe (Matthew 5:18). Whoever transcends, omits or violates the laws of nature either terminates nature or is removed from it. Natural reality is a perfect and perfectly just and perfectly stable republic in which all large-scale events are majority votes of many independent sovereign particles that are free to do whatever they "want" (Romans 8:28; Deuteronomy 28:6, Genesis 28:15, 2 Samuel 7:9). The familiar noun תורה (tora), law, comes from the verb ירה (yara), which is a verb that describes the emergence of a single effect by many little semi-independent impulses (tossed pebbles, shot arrows, cast lots). Another noun derived from this verb, namely מורה (moreh), means both rain and teacher. Natural law corresponds to a quantum impact pattern, which is the pattern of freedom: ελευθερια (eleutheria), which means freedom-by-law or freedom-by-skill: hence "the perfect law, the law of liberty"; James 1:25). Just like freedom-to-play-music comes from one's mastery of and submission to the rules of musical harmony (and the directing tastes of the audience), and one's freedom-of-speech follows from one's mastery of and submission to the rules of the community's collective language, and one's freedom-to-traverse one's home town at rush hour follows one's mastery of and submission to common rules of traffic, so divine sovereignty follows from a deeply intimate familiarity and whole-hearted submission to the emergent properties of the created collective. Eleutheria (freedom-by-law), is both a gifted quality of created reality and a skill that must be learned over time. Eleutheria is the very purpose of the Gospel (Galatians 5:1: "It's for eleutheria that Christ has eleutherized us"). Eleutheria comes from one's voluntary submission to the quantum impact pattern that arises from the unthwarted interactions of many individual elements (Romans 6:16-18), and shows the potentialities of any single element (Psalm 26:2, Romans 8:27).
But some people don't fancy freedom-by-law and are rather drawn to freedom-from-law. Fortunately for them, it is certainly possible to not submit to the laws of one's language, one's musical instrument or the traffic in one's home town. Such freedom-loving wildings who reject common law will automatically condemn themselves to speaking a language that is no language (just private baby gibberish), and producing music that isn't music (just a lot of noise), and a journey through one's town which soon ends in traffic jams or accidents. Such freedom-loving wildlings who are a law onto themselves (Habakkuk 1:7) condemn themselves to a life on one's own, to their departure from the collective that makes humanity human and onto the utter mental isolation of animals.

• The reality we have around us is comprised of atoms. All information that has ever existed and that still exerts influence upon us today, is expressed in the arrangements of atoms around us. The information that comprises our world consists of layers upon layers upon fading layers of narrative and identity (including lives lived: Isaiah 26:19, Psalm 30:9, Ecclesiastes 3:20), all stored in the hard drive that is the material universe. Literary story telling works the same way. The author of a literary work spins their story from existing strands and narrative atoms, and so unknowingly but inevitably weaves multiples layers with their deliberate story. Stories that survive the ages most commonly consist of an obvious narrative but also layer upon layer of implied narrative, with which the minds of the audience resonate at all imaginable levels. Contradictions and inefficiencies ("sins") cancel each other out and the flow of history that remains expressed in the atoms of our world is the resultant. This resultant, in turn, may be imagined as the effect of a single perfect, sinless life. All this helps to explain the literary character of Jesus of Nazareth, the three-days-in-the-earth resurrected Word in the flesh (which describes a natural phenomenon, not a religious dogma).

• Popular culture is a cloud of freely interacting and collectively contracting minds (Hebrews 12:1), a perfectly self-organizing and self-correcting human κοσμος (kosmos), that naturally gravitates upon a collective consensus. The universe expands but the kosmos contracts: with every algorithm, ratio, word, metaphor or allegory, the kosmos' entropy gets less. Just like every speaker of any language, so every story-teller acts and reacts to all others, borrows and imitates, isolates gems and polishes them into lasting tropes and leaves narrative noise for others to peruse. Starting with the ancient pioneers of human language who slowly agreed on mere words first, then common expressions, then so-called foundational stories that summarize the great truths of any cultural basin, so this cloud of freely interacting artists converges upon a hitherto unknown common core, around which it exists like a Dyson sphere around a star. Not any formal narrative — not any narrative willfully chiseled by one or a mere few, in order to reflect some dogma to revere (Isaiah 44:9-11) — but the self-correcting, heat-seeking, free exchange of fiction will lead mankind to the Truth about everything. Not the perpetually accumulating and perpetually incomplete tower of science (although science is hugely important) but the contracting cloud of fiction is the lens through which the Oneness of All Things will be perceived. This Oneness will crush every personal intent of every individual artist, because not the artist but the audience gives meaning to any work of art (which in turn means that not the writers, actors and directors of movies but rather the commercially savvy financiers are the true painters of mankind's self-portrait, the true prophets of omniscience). If the author is truly gifted, they may be able to tune into the collective voice of the audience at large and align their story with it, but they (the author) has at best only a vague notion of what their work means, or even where their inspiration came from, and is certainly no authority in matters of meaning or application (say, whether or not The Shining is about the moon landing, The Blob about Communism or Dark Side Of The Moon lines up with The Wizard Of Oz). Instead, the market judges and categorizes and associates and weaves and builds a living image of itself: like a child in a womb. The natural and spontaneous associations declared by the freely appreciating (and rewarding and buying and inspiring) audience weaves the ligaments and members of an uncontested consensus: a Truth that is omniscient but innocent, that grows at the heart of everything and encompasses everything (Psalm 139:13).

• The consciousness of a single person is self-similar to the collective global one: the consciousness of Pop Culture (hence the familiar dictum "as above, so below" and "on earth as it is in heaven"). That means that Pop Culture goes through cycles of wakefulness and sleep. A population without a synchronizing language cannot synchronize and is awake and divided. A population endowed with a synchronizing language is asleep but omniscient (Song of Solomon 5:2). The Sabbath is the day of the week on which the indentured get to practice eleutheria (freedom-by-law, not freedom-of-law), so as to slowly align the whole reality of mankind upon the attractor of freedom-by-law. When the world begins to keep the Sabbath, it begins to be an eleutheria-quasar, beaming its synchronized heartbeat of freedom into the entirety of all the universe's consciousness (Song of Solomon 4:16). That is how the universe knows that the earth has begun to be pregnant with Truth.

• Jewish mystics, who very much understood that God is Father, also understood that femininity, like everything else, must have originated in him, so that femininity is an aspect of masculinity, and certainly not a separate thing (which also explains Eve originating inside Adam: physical males have X-chromosomes in them and coming out of them, but females don't have Y's in them unless a man put it there; this also explains that Immanuel is the name of a continuous principle, not an isolated event). This means that masculinity is older and more primitive than femininity: masculinity is an old man but femininity is a young girl (Matthew 18:3). The less aggressively masculine and the more agreeably feminine our society becomes (by means of domestication: see our article on δαμαζω, damazo, to domesticate, whence δαμαρ, damar, wife), the more human individuals look like children (it has been stated that a human is a sexually mature primate fetus, which is why we are hairless). All this also implies that the shaving of one's beard is the most fundamental form of transgenderism (which is of course entirely reversable; in the Bible, the rule is that first the mind must become feminine, and then the body will follow, not vice versa: see Leviticus 19:27-28 but also 1 Corinthians 11:14-15).
The ancient sages also understood that the entirely divine Son (see Psalm 2:7) of the One and indivisible God, would incarnate in his people, who were Many. That means that plurality is an aspect of Oneness, and also certainly not a separate thing: Oneness refers to wholeness or completeness, which implies the seamless federation of constituting elements (the Latin word foederatio, federation, closely relates to fides, faith; pun intended).
The celebrated Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is the question of how to accomplish a harmonic (i.e. not forced or coerced), lasting and productive synchronicity between the old and traditional masculine and young and renewing feminine aspects of reality — where masculinity is understood as the tendency to be one, solid and individual (the singularity, perfect order, dry land, the ratio, the stationary sun, the government, the husband), and femininity is the tendency to be many, fluidic and collective (broken symmetries, perfect chaos, the waters, emotions, the highly dynamic gravitational center of all celestial objects, the governed, the wife plus all children). Masculinity seeks to impart its laws upon and govern a feminine environment. Femininity desires to be governed and apply injected laws onto maturity (Genesis 3:16). The feminine aspect of creation is embodied by the highly dynamic, "homeless", ubiquitous and formless waters (the ocean plus clouds, rain, rivers and lakes, and all water stored in chemical compounds and organisms). The apex of the masculine aspect of creation is the stationary dry land, with on it a house that is utterly stabilized by means of law. Masculinity builds the house for which femininity longs, which she perfects, so that masculinity will move into the house as her husband.
The Hebrew word for waters is מים (mayim), which is also the name of the letter מ (mem), whose numerical value is 40 (which also symbolizes an undetermined and ungoverned structureless void or period). The Hebrew word for house בית (bayit or beth), which is also the name of the letter ב (beth), whose numerical value is 2 (which also symbolizes law, and good-and-evil in a to-be-or-not-to-be sort of sense: dark and evil demonstrate the absence of light and good, not the presence of some competing second entity). These two letters can be combined to mean: an ocean of many houses, or a house where the waters are contained: both paradoxes, whose solution is the answer to the Ultimate Question.
For a union to be uncoerced, the woman cannot be starving, scared, calculative or confused or in any way bound or restricted: she must be entirely free. This means that if the man wants her, he must first endeavor to secure her comfort, well-being and wisdom: her not-needing anything (Psalm 8:5; חסר מעט, hasar me'at means to lack or need little). The woman's side of the challenge comes with her understanding what she would choose if her needs had all been met: what she would go for if she were living in a paradise.
The question of how to combine these two utterly apart conditions drives all narrative: the why and how of creation, the meaning of life, the relation of ratio and emotions, how a man might woe a woman and how a woman might select a man (so as to produce a stable, enduring and happy home and lots of well-tended children who honor their parents), how a government might relate to the people and how the people might relate to the government. When such a union is accomplished (without force, deception, dependence or compromise on either side), the result is the spectacular beginning of something entirely new and abundantly fruitful.

• In every story, song, movie or play in which a boy chases a girl, also the slings and arrows of Grand Unification are contemplated.
• Nature's own symbol for such a harmonious union (of the masculine light and the feminine water) is the rainbow (whose critical angle is 42 degrees: Genesis 9:12-17).
• In general culture, this union occurs, or should occur, between Science (masculine) and the entirety of artistic expression: Pop Culture (feminine).
• In mathematics and architecture, this harmonious union is represented by the problem of how to square (masculine) the circle (feminine). A perfect match between these two cannot be obtained by any equation that describes either (because pi is non-rational and transcendental). When the square is greater than the circle, the man overpowers the girl. When the circle is greater than the square, the woman seduces the boy. Both situations are unstable and come with their own specific sets of properties (that are briefly lived due to their instability). The rather obvious solution to this silly riddle is to project the whole thing on a spherical surface so that pi is a comfortable integer and the square is easily matched.
• In physics, this harmonious union corresponds to the problem of how to marry the masculine quantum mechanics with the feminine force of gravity. The answer hasn't been found yet, but here at Abarim Publications we suspect that the natural occurrence of this union resulted in the spontaneous formation of DNA in space. We further suspect that the formation of DNA resulted from quanta settling in Chladni patterns of gravitational waves caused by rotating black holes.
• In statecraft, this harmonious union is pursued in the relationship between the king (government and its legislation: the one voice of two bears that form a swastika, the "four corners of the earth"), and the kingdom (the population and its art and culture: the roaring of many waters, Psalm 29:3, Revelation 19:6, the "circle of the earth", Isaiah 40:22).
• In law, such a harmonious union is summed up by: "In everything, therefore, treat others the same way you want them to treat you" (Matthew 7:12; "others" are plural and thus feminine, whereas "you" is singular and thus masculine).
• In philosophy, such a harmonious union is contemplated in the concept of eleutheria, the perfect but paradoxical law of freedom: the collective law that comes from the freedom of many particles and the private freedom that comes from one's private submission to common rules.
• In literature, this harmonious union is presented in the literary character of Jesus of Nazareth (which has nothing to do with any religion), who fulfils the law and in whom there is neither male nor female: Galatians 3:28.

• The laden term creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) is problematic for several reasons. When a system may occur in different states (say water in liquid, gas and solid states) we may rightly say that the liquid came from gas (when it condensed), the solid ice came from the liquid (when it froze) and the gas came from the liquid (when it evaporated), and so on. But that doesn't explain where the water (the one substance in all its possible states) came from. Any creator who wants to create water, has to create it complete with all its possible states. Likewise, all the energy in the universe may be extremely spread out (heat death), or cuddled up in a balmy average 3K (that's the universe we live in), or contracted into a raging pip of unimaginable density (from which commenced the Big Bang). But that does not explain where the whole system came from.
You can't contemplate the origin of a system in the terms of the system. That's why we can't bite our own teeth (in the excellent analogy of Alan Watts). It's also why we can't solve a problem with the same rules that caused it (as Einstein volunteered). And it's also why the axioms of a system can't be explained by the system.
A one-dimensional line that extends onto infinity in both its directions terminates (and thus begins) in its every point in any direction not of the line. Likewise, a two-dimensional plane that extends onto infinity in each of its four directions terminates (and thus begins) in its every point in any direction not of the plane. Likewise, a three-dimensional space that extends onto infinity in each of its six directions terminates (and thus begins) in its every point in any direction not of the space. Spacetime has four (or more) dimensions but the principle holds. Life is a true fifth dimension. Consciousness is a sixth. Apparently, there is a seventh... But the origin of each and any of them sits within every point of them. The origin of a system is omnipresent within the system.
Ramanujan Summation shows that the sum of all natural numbers is minus one twelfth (-1/12). The sum of all natural numbers is a divergent series, which means that it is only limited by the boundaries of reality of the numberverse itself. So while you are still counting, and have thus not reached infinity, your sum is partial and obviously getting bigger and bigger, but when you have reached and passed infinity, and have in effect transcended the boundaries of numerical reality, your sum looks like something that could have passed for -1/12 still back inside numerical reality. That makes one wonder what little negative things might exist like tiny fleeting imaginary hopes within our harsh human reality that are actually equal to the sum of everything once one transcends the boundaries of observable reality and ventures into the howling infinite of human imagination.
Time is an obvious quality of the thermodynamic universe but life is not. Living things don't interact according to the laws of thermodynamics. In fact, life is so very alien to the material universe that its nature and thus its origin is as much a mystery as the origin of spacetime. The continuum of life is seated upon time like a dimension but its continuum (let's say the continuum of motivations, concerns and activities) is not time depended. Life marks one of the edges of spacetime, together with the speed of light and infinite energy density. All these three things are obviously intimately related to the thermodynamic universe but in them (or "at" them), all rules fold, all bets are cancelled, and a new covenant begins to come in effect.
That means that the statement that life began at some point in the thermodynamic universe is only true from the perspective of the thermodynamic universe (stones would concur). But soul may very well be like a passenger who steps into a taxi: demonstrating a moment of touch-down but not one of creation. Soul may very well have had its absolute beginning outside of spacetime, even as a kind of twin universe initially wholly severed from its material kin, making living things wormholes that connect the two. Allowing that, then soul may very well have had primality, and spacetime may actually be a function of soul rather than the other way around (the Big Bang that gave us spacetime may have occurred in the Bigger Bang that produced soul). Sounds bizarre? To extend the age old conundrum: what came first, the egg or the hatchling that came out of the egg?
A chicken embryo is conceived within the mother before the egg shell is constructed around it and the whole thing plops out. A chicken embryo is originally a part of the physical continuum that is the mother, quite alike a mammalian embryo, and the eggshell severs it. The eggshell may appear to be miraculously "fine-tuned" to miraculously bring about a young chicken within it, but the fact of the matter is that the shell is constructed around the earlier embryonic chicken like gold hammered upon the more primal shape of some wooden base. Jesus appeared within humanity (like life within an egg), but he nevertheless had primality over humanity (as the creating Word). In fact, allowing for all this suggests that, no, the material universe did not bring about life, which brought about mind, but mind brought about soul which brought about matter.
First came Cinderella's foot, then came the shoe to match it. First came the Spirit, then came the waters and responded (Genesis 1:2). First came DNA, then the cell was constructed around it. First came the Ark, then the tabernacle, the temple and finally the Body of Christ. First came Adam (Genesis 1:26-27), then came his body (Genesis 2:7) and only then came Paradise for Adam to live in (Genesis 2:8). First came Israel the living people, then came Israel the land for them to live in. First came the living Body of Christ, then came the New Jerusalem for them to live in.
But be all that as it may, the Big Bang story is not a creation story. It tells us what happens with all the energy when it's already there and in a specific state, but it doesn't tell us where it came from (or even how it came to be in that state). In fact, just like the origin of H₂O (the somehow harmonic merger of hydrogen and oxygen, two elementary substances whose qualities are wholly unlike that of the compound) is not more intimately related to steam, water or ice, so the origin of the universe is not more intimately related to any of its states, not to the singularity on one end, not to heat death on the other end, and not to our present universe in between. Just like you cannot swim out of a pool, so you cannot roll back history to before time began.
In entirely the same way, Evolution Theory does not tell of the origin of life. It tells of what happens to life when it is there and gets to do what it does. Evolution Theory tells of the evolution of life (and thus, colloquially, the "origin" of species) but not the origin of life. It also does not discuss the evolutionary state of affairs in the material realm before evolution began (which is a quality of life: no life, no evolution), so as to account for the emergence of DNA. DNA gives birth to DNA but DNA itself was never birthed (compare Ezekiel 16:1-14 to Hebrews 7:3). DNA is inconceivably more complex than the most complex naturally occurring molecule, which in effect means that the original unbirthed single-cellular creatures from which all subsequent living things evolved did not come about in any way that is comparable to the coming about of anything living afterwards. The original unbirthed single-cellular creatures (who were not only unbirthed but also had nothing organic to eat or oxygen to breathe — as the lady sang: "What it takes to come alive! We found love in a hopeless place!") were precisely as complex as any human is today, and neither they nor us are in any way more intimately related to the origin of life. Likewise, the origin of the universe does not sit right before the beginning of the expansion of the singularity.
Anyone who makes a coherent statement including the word "nothing" is required to carefully define "nothing" and recognize it when they see it (so as to point at it and say: now that is where the universe came out of). And there's the rub. A situation that involves two zebras is contingent on a situation that involves one zebra, and, conveniently, one zebra looks very different from one apple, which is how we can tell them apart. Yet zero zebras is identical to zero apples. They look the same and can't be told apart. That means that one zebra is not contingent on zero zebras and thus zero apples. You can't expect the condition of zero zebras to bring about one zebra because the zero zebras might instead give you one apple.
Nothing is a condition that contains zero zebras, zero apples and zero of anything that we can detect in any possible way, or anything that we cannot (yet) detect in any way, or anything that we can imagine but that cannot ever be detected in any possible way (things like words and numbers and ideas and perhaps even feelings and consciousness), and ... (drum roll) ... anything that we cannot ever hope to begin to imagine but which still might be very real in a way that will forever escape us. Or anybody else. Or anything else. Nothing is that which does not relate to anything else, whose existence is not confirmed by anything that it is not. Nothing is alone: it may exist in some weird ontological way but nobody knows it does. It might as well not. There is no difference between nothing-that-does-exist and nothing-that-does-not-exist.
Nothing is alone and is identical to everything, as long as everything has no structure (is void and formless). The question: "why is there some-thing rather than no-thing" is contingent on the assumption that something differs from nothing, but that is only true when the something is distinguished from everything and thus from another something. If awareness is only of nothing and thus of everything, the distinction between nothing and everything begins when a distinction is enlightened between "I am" and "I am not"; the moment when self-awareness attains the awareness of the boundaries of the self. And that's the moment of creation of the universe: not in some silly first-point of time sort of way (because time is a mere local creature within the much greater whole of reality) but as an unfolding stage of rules emerging from the Über-rule: "Let there be [something beside me]!". But that moment is not so much linked to the Big Bang (when there was no structure) and also not to the Heat Death (when all structure is gone) but rather to the middle part, when life can exist within the material world, and consciousness within the living world. The beginning of the universe, specifically, occurs when the collective consciousness of all the universe's living things has attained common standards (and that can only come from knowing the one Logos that the entire universe shares) and thus a consistent and coherent cosmic language and has become One and cries out in confidence: I AM! This is not when the first (collective) feeling is felt or emotion is experienced, but when the first rational thought is wrought: when the first ratio is established, and something is compared to some other thing. And the First Cosmic Word is uttered.
When Jesus summed up the entire Law with: "Treat others the way you want to be treated", he wasn't kidding. That single statement sums up the Logos as it defines God before the beginning: if there are no others, this rule requires the creation of them, lest God would not comply with his own nature. This rule is indeed the Grand Unified Theory that explains all of existence, all relativity and all origin.
All this additionally suggests that the entire system of creation-plus-Creator is self-similar to one single human infant, not merely attaining self-awareness and internal-reality building of that-which-it-is-not, but also awaking to a world inconceivably greater than even itself could have imagined.
In short, nothing is a very big word and defining it is quite paradoxical an exercise, but not unheard of in serious mythology ("Who poked you in the eye, O Cyclops?" "Why, Nobody did!") and certainly not futile. Here it goes: Nothing is something that does not sequentially or causationally (or ontologically or in any other way) relate to the plane of reality of the observer who uses this word "nothing". This same (paradoxical) definition but told in bronze age terms rather than our fancy modern ones would probably arrive at something very close to Exodus 16:15.
But now that we know what "nothing" is we further conclude that the universe was created "out of nothing" not once, 14 billion years ago, but at least three times: when the continuum of spacetime began, when the continuum of life began, and when the continuum of consciousness began: three instances of the emergence of a continuum that cannot be explained by anything available without that continuum. Rumor has it that a fourth creation event is in the making (correspondent to day 4 of creation, which in turn suggests that we have at least 2 more coming — and no, Genesis 1 is surely not about the first 144 hours of life-as-we-know-it). Mysteries abound but suffice it to say that consciousness arose in the biosphere, life in the material sphere and spacetime in whatever, all as part of one integrated "thing" whose oneness was never compromised. Said otherwise: consciousness arose the way a tomato arises: it was produced by a plant that wasn't simply "fine-tuned" for that (as the argument goes, as if producing tomatoes is something a tomato plant has to be fine-tuned for) but rather as integral part of the plant, which was simply being itself wholly and fully, ever since it first emerged from the singularity that was the tomato seed. The question of fine tuning is probably not as interesting as the question of whether our celebrated rational consciousness is the tomato or whether we are here merely to produce it, and something even greater than us wonderous humans is still to come.
But while we consider that, let's agree that if something (thing A) is contingent on something else (thing B), the things A and B are really part of the same system: thing AB. Even when the sequence of events is irreversible (B = a bottle, A = a broken bottle), the two things are related and topologically coherent. If thing A is contingent on thing B, A can come out of B. If A is not contingent on B, A cannot come out of B. That means that the term "something from nothing" is incoherent (like dry water or dark light). Something can only come from something that is sufficiently similar to actually be the same thing, just a different state (chicken, egg, another chicken, another egg: all one entity that may be chicken or egg or chicken laying an egg or coming out of one). Something cannot come from something that has nothing to do with it.
If "nothing" is a thing whose existence is identical to its non-existence, then "nothingness" is a quality that lies entirely in the eye of the beholder, and says more about the observer than the observed. A declaration of nothingness demonstrates a cognitionary event horizon: a boundary beyond which the observer cannot see or guess. But since the observer cannot guess beyond this cognitionary event horizon, the observer can also not assert that the "nothing" on the other end cannot cross the event horizon from the other side and enter the observer's realm as something "wholly other". At the danger of resurrecting the God of the Gaps: the nothingness that exists (or doesn't; same thing) beyond one's cognitionary event horizon results in mystery (and humor) within one's reality: something utterly novel that descends like fine mist from one's event horizon and changes one's core. Nothingness generates cognitionary Hawking Radiation. Nothingness is seminal.
If reality (as a product of consciousness) is self-similar to material reality, it should be expected to consists of the molecules of reality (whatever that means), which in turn consist of constituting atoms whose qualities bear no resemblance to the qualities of the molecule they form. Our universe (thing C) is not contingent on a previous thing B or a previous thing A (B is not C is not A, or if you insist: B is nothing to C and nothing to A), but rather on the merger of B and C — B and C being the masculine and feminine aspects of reality, both contained within the singular masculine God ("in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them"; Genesis 1:27, and see Deuteronomy 6:4 relative to Genesis 2:24), as explained above. This is why the Kabbalists speak of tzimtzum and everybody else of panentheism (not pan-theism but pan-en-theism: everything is in God): God created the universe within Himself and out of Himself (not out of "nothing").
We can extend this to solve the problem of the often asked question: "What then created God?" The answer is: "nothing" created God, which means that the assumed cause of God's existence sits outside the compass of our observable, perceivable or imaginable reality. Said slightly more impenetrably: the progressive line of causation of God's existence does not extend into our reality, and cannot be identified or even considered by the means at hand. So yes, God's identity (which includes his uncaused eternity) can be known by us in our reality but his boundaries and thus his cause cannot. Perhaps this will change when we join him in his reality. Who knows? But as soon as we know where God came from and perhaps learn about his other limitations, we have become like him: divine players in a super-divine reality, which is of course a noble pursuit (Matthew 5:48, Ephesians 5:1) but not without peril (Genesis 3:22).
The question "why is there something rather than nothing?" is not a question about existing but about relating. It doesn't ask about existing but about realizing, about being conscious enough to assess an encounter with something of which we are conscious but into which our consciousness does not extend. Our question asks: why is there something to relate to, and to be alike to, rather than nothing to relate to or be alike to? The obvious answer: we relate because we are conscious, and relating is what consciousness does. It's its nature, like water is wet and light luminates.
An ovum may have sat unutilized within a woman for fifty years, but that's completely irrelevant because when it gets hit by a sperm and becomes a living zygote and thus a living member of the same species of its parents, its own lifetime clock begins at t=0. Right after t=0, the zygote breaches and quickly becomes a multiverse of loosely related cells. Nine months later it gets born and begins to breathe and interact with the greater world: spacetime as we know it commences. This not only suggest that our reality is the consequence of a cosmic conception, but also that consciousness the way we experience it is in fact seated in the multiverse, rather than just our own local verse (as delightfully explored in Everything Everywhere All At Once, 2022, and of course various episodes of Rick and Morty, 2013).

• A god is essentially an aspect of human governance — in the broadest sense of the word and however far removed: gods are whatever make us do some things and not other things: natural forces, diseases, the presence of threatening animals or human enemies, necessity, fear, anger, desire, greed, superstition, boredom, curiosity, love, empathy, rationality, skills, science, wisdom, vision and so on. This is why Egyptian, Persian and Roman rulers could be deified: simply because the same quality of governance that makes a king a king is what makes a god a god.
There are many gods (1 Corinthians 8:5, 2 Corinthians 4:4), but the God of the Bible is not the god of the gaps (the god of the unknown), but rather the God of knowledge and skill (and thus of consciousness). He is the God of the known (John 4:22) and the obvious (Romans 1:20) as well as the obscure (1 Corinthians 2:10) and the rationally believed (Hebrews 11:1). And the God of the Bible is not even "merely" the God of Knowledge; he is rather the God of the Unity Of All Knowledge (which is where the "mono" in monotheism comes from), and the unity of all knowledge, consensus, is obviously a thing that surpasses all knowledge in greatness (Ephesians 3:19, Philippians 4:7).
The God of the Bible is the God of information technology (writing, data retention: Psalm 16:10), communication (hence language), record keeping and correspondence (our word "angel" is the Persian word for mailman; hence agent K in Men in Black-II), algorithmic thought (i.e. lawfulness: consciousness based on global rules rather than private feelings), and thus all science and hence all technology (Exodus 31:1-11). That's why God's son (as mentioned in Psalm 2:7) is the Logos (John 1:1), which is the unified body of collective human knowledge, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3), in whom all things are summed up (Ephesians 1:10), and who gives humans understanding in all things (2 Timothy 2:7, also see 1 Thessalonians 5:21). This is why he grows (Luke 2:40, 2:52) and gets greater (John 3:30).
This is also why people who are serious about God, the Son of God, mankind and salvation are also very serious about cosmology (Psalm 19:1), quantum mechanics (Genesis 13:16), relativity and chaos theory (Matthew 6:10), biology (1 Kings 4:33), history (Lamentations 5:7) and all that (Proverbs 1:7). Theology is the study of Everything, and its fruit is technology (that serves mankind in a peaceful and productive and well-balanced world).

• The idea that God (from here onward: i.e. the God of the Bible, the God of the Unity of Knowledge and thus of wisdom, freedom-by-law and love) must either exist or he must not exist, and that anyone rational must choose between either of these two positions is patently and painfully false. Proponents of this view should take a good look at the story of Schrödinger's Cat, as we will do further below. The reality in which God really and literally exists and the one in which God really and literally does not exist, exist simultaneously in the world in which we live.
God is the Oneness of All Things, which very closely correlates to the concept of completeness (the familiar term shalom, peace, literally means completeness) and that is a very big deal. The consideration of a complete set of anything requires the review of all its elements and forbids there to be any missing ones — because as soon as it becomes clear that the reviewable parts don't wholly add up and there is obviously something missing, it immediately becomes unclear how much is missing and how much we actually got. We might think we're looking at a mere cute fuzzy fluff, while in fact the cute fuzzy fluff is the extremity of the tail end of a ferocious beast that's somehow hidden from our view. The missing part may actually be 99% of what we're trying to look at, and the part we so proudly got may be a measly 1% (this incidentally also demonstrates the folly of certainty in cosmology or physics or even biology, since "dark matter" and "junk DNA" make up major portions of that what we're trying to understand, and all we know about them is that they relate in no way to what we got or understand so far.
What we do know since Kurt Gödel (1930) is that any axiomatic system, including science, must always remain incomplete, which means that the scientific enterprise cannot consider completeness. Just like a power drill is not for playing Mozart, so science is not for considering the whole of absolutely everything. That in turn means that science cannot determine the context of any fact or observation relative to absolutely everything else, and inadvertently assigns too much importance to some things (including itself, inevitably) and not enough to others.
"Absolutely everything" cannot be scientifically described, and any attempt to indeed ascribe the value of anything relative to absolutely everything else requires a super- or trans-scientific method. That means that science may only assess a thing's nature and value relative to its next neighbors: science may only work locally and discontinuously, but not universally and continuously. This means that for science to be truthful (or faithful to the covenant of honesty), it must be atheistic.
Science cannot be anti-theistic (as some scientists claim they are), because one cannot be against something that one cannot consider. Anti-theism is certainly possible and allowed, but only as an artistic effort, not a scientific or rational one. Anti-theism assumes a theo to be against, and is thus a form of theism. Science, contrarily, must be a-theistic, meaning not-theistic, or not in any way concerned with the unified whole of absolutely everything. The closest science can come to God is the (idle) hope for a Grand Unified Theory or the Theory of Absolutely Everything. Since science must remain incomplete, science can never experience this GUTH or THOAE, and can only "believe" in its reality from a distance. Belief in a distant deity (whilst adhering to a rule-based rigor) is the characteristic of religion. The experience of the deity (who is then no longer distant) is the asymptote of religion. That means that science is much closer related to religion, which does the same, than to theism, which does not believe in what it doesn't know but experiences what it does know (John 4:22). In fact, the purpose of religion, and thus science, is to introduce the concept and purpose of general rules to a lawless society and to have a community collectively become accustomed to a reality that is governed by general laws rather than emotions and bullies. Religion is the juvenile MS-DOS of the adolescent WINDOWS that is science. Without religion there could not have been science, and science is not the opposite but the greatest of all religions. With its insistence on pureness of thought and righteousness of living, science is the John the Baptist among the mortals — the greatest born of women yet less than the least in the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 11:11).
Theism is the intimate experience of absolutely everything: not the myriad details of absolutely everything but the singular wholeness of absolutely everything: the Oneness of Absolutely Everything, which, once realized transforms the consciousness into a self-similar Oneness, a singularly complete like a living seed and far greater than the greatest wooden beam, and simultaneously integrates it into the Greater Oneness of Absolutely Everything.
Theism, in whatever rudimentary form, has always been the world's shepherd, and science is pre-agricultural Homo erectus at best, highly intelligent but an animal among the polytheistic animals: bulls, bears, squirrels, neither virtuous nor vicious but utterly unable to experience nakedness and rational only with a bristly tribal instinct. The most obvious difference between science and theism is that science is as tribal as any religion, whereas theism is kind to all (Proverbs 12:10). Theism has always created the world's farm, where animals domesticated each other despite their divergent natures. Rationalism, though crucially and wondrously important, is nothing more than a farming machine: a tractor or excavator. In the literal reality of these tractors and excavators, there literally exists neither God nor free will, and there is only mindless mechanism and causality and an infinite multiverse to account for variety. But atop that tractor or excavator, there sits Farmer George enjoying the sun in his face, singing meaningless ditties to his sweetheart, whilst pulling weird faces that will hopefully make them laugh. To the tractor and excavator, such endeavors simply do not exist.
Science can only be incomplete, which puts an infinite chasm between it and completeness (Luke 16:26). The missing chunk, the bridge across the chasm, cannot be provided in the terms of incompleteness and only in the terms of completeness. The bridge across the chasm can only be imagined (and no, this does not open the door to the God-of-the-gaps: completion is a condition performed by all elements, not only by the last one joining: Psalm 118:22). This not only makes God imaginary (yes, entirely in a square-root-of-negative-one sort of sense), it also explains that the art of imagination (the realization of what can't be observed) is what makes the mind so very special, even equal in substance to the Creator. In fact, the word δοξα (doxa), which is usually translated with the rather inert term "glory" is much more accurately translated as "imagination". This noun derives from the verb δοκεω (dokeo), which describes the art of evoking images in one's mind that are relevant to observable reality but not part of it (of whatever might be around the corner, or in the future, or in someone else's mind). If God is the ratio of all things, then imagination is greater than the greatest thing that the ratio can produce, and the only exercise that yields truly original hypotheses for the rational mind to flesh out. That means that the experience of the deity is neither rational nor irrational but transrational an exercise (Philippians 4:7, Ephesians 3:19). Without the inspiration of transrationalism (i.e. meaningful imagination, i.e. collective imagination), rationalism is inert and dead without aim or purpose, like an ovum that was never fertilized or like hair that is without soul once it emerges from the skin (Judges 16:17, Ecclesiastes 9:4-6). Imagination allows mankind to envision an objective to shoot for, which is indistinguishable from a future generation traveling back through time to inspire humanity in the present (hence Star Trek: First Contact, 1996).
Rationalism and transrationalism both require formidable mental discipline (without it, both endeavors result in madness, which are convictions that are only privately held and cannot be shared because nobody wants them). Computers and Artificial Intelligence have begun to perform much of the heavy lifting in regards to rationality, which is reducing the need for the development of people's "organic" rational skills (very much comparable to the mechanization of the agricultural industry in modern times). But unfortunately, AI is also pounding out artwork that is much more attune to the subliminal effects upon customers than anything any human artist could produce, which means that industry at large prefers to work with AI over human designers. That discourages young generations to go into art, which implies that humanity's popular sense of imagination will soon atrophy. Humans used to spend their evenings in conversation or being entertained by fellow humans, and practiced their imaginations with every idle moment spent day dreaming. Today we don't daydream but check our social media profiles.
Humanity is very clearly performing a purge upon itself. In all kinds of ways it is producing night-light lures to attract those elements that waste more energy than they produce, so that they willingly choose a painless suicide over a paradise they have to work for. Entirely similarly, the human brain sheds much of its initial neurons and neural connections in utero and during the first few years if life.
The transrational position, in which someone is both atheist and theist, packs a dualism that is comparable to the wave-particle duality of material quanta. Exploring it requires a revolution in psychology that easily compares to the quantum mechanical revolution of the early 20th century. Transrationalism is the intellectual equivalent of complex numbers, in which the scientific component corresponds to real numbers and the theistic component to imaginary numbers. Both are crucial to a properly functioning mind within a great technological world. The rational shell (the synthetic clothes that the living body wears) of a mind whose emotional core experiences the deity must be purely mechanical and thus entirely atheistic: not swayed by bias or rejection of terms on emotional grounds. In any engineering situation, the engineer(s) cannot include the deity into their designs (Luke 14:28), and any (junior) engineer who appeals to the selective mercies of the Almighty rather than general algorithms will surely be dismissed. Emotions are always private and any common house (any technological complex) that does not stand on common algorithms but rather on private feelings is divided against itself, is inherently unstable and must ultimately collapse (Matthew 12:25). Said otherwise: our wonderful human world of technological marvels (from our clothing to the space shuttle, from our wristwatch to the Internet, from abacus to AI) is the fruit of ruthlessly disciplined and principled atheism: the mechanical foundation of pure living theism (Exodus 25:22).
Transrationalism is the effect of transcending the asymptote of rationality, and the transition from considering reality as a collection of quantified factoids to a seamless unity (John 19:23) where one is One with all others including the deity. The signature difference between the methods of science and theism is that science accumulates its tower from its axiomatic foundation up, whereas theism imagines the Oneness of all things and names all individual things relative to that Oneness, and thus from the top down. Theism works by inspiration that comes from without the mind and enters the mind and falls to its living bedrock like rain, where it allows the information-based vegetation of reason to grow.
Transrationalism surely makes use of mechanisms but does not emphasize formal truths or even the correctness of knowledge, since any transrational shepherd is perfectly happy realizing that his dog is commonly much more right about observable reality than he. Instead, transrationalism emphasizes the unified economy of information. Dogs are better at gleaning information from the local scene but shepherds use language to weave a global network that transacts much more data than any dog with its pack. Since transrationalism emerged in the world, Homo sapiens (man of taste/discernment) has been surpassed by Homo retis (man of the network).
The most celebrated scientists among us today are actually not scientists but transrationalists. A true scientist is an animal, a religious mind, who faithfully follows rules and deduces knowledge and accumulates it from the bottom up, and orders and transforms it perhaps somewhat but never actually introduces anything truly new. A transrational scientist, however, draws information from a mythical or angelic realm "beyond" and then painstakingly translates it back into any common human medium (words and metaphor, paint and composition, music and mathematics).
Transrationalism obviously occurs much more commonly among artists than scientists: Moses, Muhammad and Homer were typically transrationalists (hence the whole elaborate descriptions of Moses coming down the mountain or Muhammad emerging from the cave seeking scribes to recite to). But so was the famous mathematician Ramanujan, whose struggle with Hardy was not about his miraculous formulas (which he received, wholly alike Moses and Muhammad, from a divine agent) but rather Hardy's demand for a rational trajectory that led to them from the axioms up (rather than from the heavens down). Nikola Tesla invented the alternating current induction motor literally in a simulation that he ran in his imagination. Stephen Hawking arrived at Hawing Radiation not after hours of calculations and deductions but involuntarily imagined it when he relaxed his mind while getting ready for bed. The periodic table, the structure of hydrocarbons, the Bohrian atom, relativity theory, even Cartesian geometry were all literally dreamed up by their inventors, whose sole remaining burden was to find ways to record it all and in such a way that others could take notice of their transrational insights.
When Israel was still a mere large family, the most emphasized of the twelve tribal sons of Jacob was not Judah but Joseph, the dreamer with the varicolored coat, who became Egypt's viceroy and saved the world from starvation. After this Joseph was named the father-by-law of Jesus. In telling the origin of Jesus, Matthew reports five major dream sequences between the discovery of Mary's pregnancy (Matthew 1:20) and their return from Egypt (2:22, see 2:12, 2:13, 2:19). When as an adult Jesus triumphantly entered Jerusalem, he did so famously on a young donkey. The word for little donkey is οναριον (onarion); the word for dream is οναρ (onar).
Someone with only knowledge of the divine but no rationality to stand on is an naked psychotic (1 Samuel 19:24, Luke 8:27, Mark 14:51). Someone with only rationality but no knowledge of the divine is a dried up corpse under a mountain of clothing (Acts 7:58, Judges 14:12-13), hence too Star Trek's menacing Borg, "the Federation's most lethal enemy" as Captain Picard put it.
Just like a quantum must be both wave and particle (and therefor neither), so a godly person must be both theist and atheist (and therefor neither). A godly person is both very serious about science and technology (eternally incomplete), and divinity (eternally complete). Ratio must be entirely rational, or else it cannot else but collapse into inconsistency and ultimately insanity and a fatal plunge back to the world of unreasonable animals from which it sought to flee. But rationality without transrationality will atrophy and petrify.

• Rationality is always about ratios between things, never about accepting one and rejecting the other. In fact, judging between the selected and rejected is precisely what the Bible connects to the original sin. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is not a "knowledge" tree (as some commentators curiously maintain) or even one of knowing evil, but rather of knowing good and evil. A mature rational mind considers all things utterly irrespective of one's own tastes and leanings, even to the point where one's private beliefs and hopes are entirely cloaked by one's ratio (and exposed only occasionally and to a very small cluster of intimate familiars). Ratio is garment (Genesis 3:21, Revelation 7:9) and to the pure, all is pure (Titus 1:15), and all things are permitted (1 Corinthians 10:23).
Reality is about relationships across the scope of one entire system. Whether God exists or not depends on the compass of one's native system, and whether one relates to God or not. The reality within which God has obvious existence and the one in which God cannot even be regarded exist simultaneously in the world in which we live, because the reality in which God does exist encompasses the reality in which he does not. Or as Obi-Wan said to Luke: "You've taken your first step into a larger world."
Every person who comes to know God does so necessarily from a position of adolescent atheism, and it's from that position of innate atheism that we can share the gospel with other atheists. Any adult who denies ever having been a child is not a mature adult. Any adult who has forgotten being a child has never actually grown up. Just like Jesus became human to save ungodly humans, so every godly person must be able to wholeheartedly be atheist to save atheists. Those who are unable to wholeheartedly embrace atheism are not godly, just religious: believing in a god that does not exist is worse than rational atheism, because rational atheism is the first step onto true godliness (compare Joshua 24:2 to Genesis 12:1-3).
Philosophy's job is to understand all things and the relationship of all things. That is the great command. The second command, equal to the first, is that philosophy has to explain its findings to people who aren't naturally gifted with the talents required to spontaneously understand all things and the relationship of all things, but who nevertheless partake in the world within which the philosophers are free to operate. This is why philosophy must also know how to spin yarn, how to tell stories, how to sandwich nutritious metaphor in the vanilla creme of mere entertainment.
By the time Jesus preached, the world had long begun to be scientific: the schools of Pythagoras and Euclid had existed for centuries. Yet Jesus chose to tell stories, simply because the whole of reality is only explained by narrative fractals, not by autonomous facts (Psalm 78:2, Matthew 13:35).
Philosophy is the kind of thing that has no boundary on either side of the divide. There are always more arguments formulatable, even if that means that all us deep thinkers end up in a tiny little hole all by ourselves in the congratulatory illusion that we still somehow matter. We don't. All that matters is that the market at large got bored with us long before we gave our final irrelevant answer. The world around us is not founded on philosophy or even rationality but on cooperation, on working together despite our differences and even deriving strength from our differences. Until very recently, the neutrino (the Pollux to the Castor that is the electron) was unknown to the world, simply because the neutrino could/would/did not respond to the electromagnetic force by which electrons hold our material world together. As Taylor so astutely noted: "Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate," but perhaps somewhat less festive and more traditional: some of us can/will/do respond to the Holy Spirit and combine and build and give life, whereas others can't/won't/don't and are headed for an existence as a formless cloud, forever unnoticed and utterly irrelevant (even utterly incapable of ever detecting the world that the receivers of the Holy Spirit build).
Anyone (whether rational or not) will always choose the reality to which they are most attracted. In our world today, traffic between these realities is still possible. At some point in the near future, this bridge will fail (Schrödinger's Cat will be out of the bag/box) and traffic will cease and the peoples of each reality will each go their way. Human collective consciousness today sits within the egg shell that is our material universe. Consciousness that remains in the reality in which God has never existed will remain attached to the material, will remain inside the egg, and will ultimately be torn asunder in the universe's impending heat death (Quran.2.123). Consciousness that learns to transcend the material universe and hack itself a way out of the egg will live happily ever after in the reality in which God has always been real.

(• And why does the Almighty God create a world in which children get cancer, and then won't cure them? He didn't. God did not create cancer for the same reason that he didn't write Die Zauberflöte or painted the Mona Lisa or dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. And there are certain things that even an Almighty God can't do. To some critics this has meant that God is not really omnipotent, but others understand that if God is indeed real, then he only has real qualities, and not even his omnipotence will cross the boundaries of what is possible. If he would, he would destroy the entirety of our reality, so perhaps his absolute omnipotence is limited by something stronger than power (Zechariah 4:6).
Cancer comes from disharmony. It arises when a cell misinterprets the body's common genome and is not corrected by neighboring cells. If an individual mind indeed derives from the global one, then the global fight against poverty and disconnectedness and ignorance may very well be our strongest weapon against physical cancer. Yet, we live in a world that has collectively decided to reward billions of dollars to the likes of Taylor Swift Incorporated while the people who actually know how to govern and unite the world (and study the mechanism of the human body and its relation to the mechanism of global humanity: scientists rather than stage magicians and chorus girls) have to go door to door, hat in hand, begging for scraps. As most excellently demonstrated in Special Ops: Lioness (2023), our world comprises many layers of conflicting interests, all swayed by different forms of temptation, all ultimately protected and healed from the bottom up by individuals, flawed as hell, who give their lives in service of others. The God of the Unity of Human Knowledge did not make our world: we vote it into form with every dollar we spend, every word we speak and every bullet we fire (or dodge, as Harry Styles put it). Do we want Taylor or do we want cancer research? Do we want Ace of Spades or Poker Face or some more of Psalm 42? It's up to us, and not to God. But a fool and his soul are soon parted (Matthew 16:26).
God cannot break the laws that define him, or else he would cease to exist as "God" (this opens a whole new can of worms, but see John 10:17 relative to Philippians 2:6-8, which implies that God may change his state even into non-existence without stopping to be himself; perhaps not unlike the universe, but then the other way around. This in turn means that although our identity depends on our relationship with God, his identity is not dependent on his relationship with us, which is true in the complicated ways we discussed earlier). God can also not break the laws that define us, or else we would cease to exist as "us" (which in turn means that if our relationship with God is severed, the laws that define our reality are going to change and we will enter a reality "in which God is not" — we'll get into that further below, but for now let's say that when satan was tempting Jesus, he was trying to get him to do something he hadn't thought of himself. Jesus didn't budge, of course, so satan's "prayer" wasn't heard. Godly people pray for God to make his will (his law, or the algorithms of nature whose mastery allows even curing cancer) known to them, instead of the other way around. People whose prayers aren't heard aren't Christlike but satan-like. Their prayers would only be heard there where God is not and where his laws are irrelevant and can be easily overruled by anybody's desires. This may sound like wonderland to some, but to those who understand that all desires differ, and a reality based on different demands and standards is an incoherent cloud of only chaos. People who understand the crucial importance of the inviolability of a single and unified and consistent natural law know that God cannot create a stone he cannot lift, or a room he cannot enter.
God cannot create dry water, because the defining quality of water is wetness: no wetness, no water. God can also not create dark light because the defining quality of light is that it is luminescent: no lumination, no light. God can also not create silent sound because the defining quality of sound is that it is audible.
God cannot instantaneously create humanity without them having evolved from much earlier life forms, together with all other life forms and within the much greater but unified living world. This is why the Bible says that the quintessential matriarch Eve was the "mother of all life" (Genesis 3:20), not an adult human female, as some erroneously have it, but the whole of the biosphere (making Adam any living thing; whatever goes for Adam, goes for all living individuals; Homo sapiens only breached from the animal world in Noah, which is why Jesus said: "They knew not until the flood came", Matthew 24:39; also see Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10).
Evolution is a defining aspect of life and without it, there is no complex life. God cannot instantaneously create an adult human person who is defined by decades of learning, reflecting and revising. The defining nature of that adult is the time and resolve it took to get there plus the world in which the getting was gotten: a single reasonable adult human being is a temporal pip in a vast and near-eternal ocean of material, biological and mental goings on, formed continuously by that vast ocean. No billions of years of evolution, no thirty year old adult human.
God cannot create milk without first creating a mammal (or else it's not milk). God cannot instantaneously create the product of a context without first creating that producing context (or else it's not a product). God cannot instantaneously create experience without the event that is experienced (or else it's not an experience). He cannot instantaneously create an adult human with an expertise in basketball, a perfect ballerina, with muscles of a 20 year stint in a gym, a Ph.D. in French literature, and capable of making well-informed decisions about complex affairs. Those things take time and effort to attain and God is not time or effort (and does not infringe the nature of time, which is to prevent everything from happening at once, as Einstein put it, or that of effort, which is the key to everything possible, as Genesis 11:6 puts it).
God wants but cannot instantaneously create living physical beings, and must first create a perfectly operating material universe for life to commence in. God wants but cannot instantaneously create a perfect world in which a human society has attained freedom and a perfect life. What he can do (and what he has done) is create life and give it instructions on how to get there and attract it from a position in the future toward himself. What he can do (and what he has done) is to exist within his own creation as an Attractor upon which the dynamic system must converge and will eventually settle (John 12:32). The Big Pull is as much a part of the formative mechanism of the universe as is the more familiar Big Bang.
Ever since we were single cellular, we've followed the attraction of where we deeply desired to be, even if we could not begin to imagine what that might look like. Ever since we were single cellular we've tried to cooperate with each other, to create standards of communication and colonies, to be kind to [most] strangers and to build a better, cooperative and wondrously symbiotic world.
Reality is a singular unified web and all elements of it exist by merit of all the others. There cannot exist a reality in which a Mozart writes Die Zauberflöte without the physical laws and creative freedom that allows the next guy to rape and murder. This is why the technicians among us build pianos for the Mozarts and prisons for the rapists. And as long as there are Mozarts among us, we — the world's engineers, doctors, soldiers, law-makers, authors, artists, musicians and financiers; all of us — will stubbornly refuse to blow up the world on account of the rapists and cancer and evil (and in effect join and aid them in their sickening destruction: compare Genesis 18:22-33 to Matthew 13:30). Yes we can, but as long as there is a critical and ever waxing mass of unity and cooperation and enlightenment within the howling infinite of darkness, we won't.
Critics who wield the "argument from evil" forget that evil is the cross on which Christ (and see Hebrews 1:3) dies, precisely to counteract the sins of man, so as to maintain a reality in which can also exist creative beauty, love, hope, wisdom, peace and magnificence. People who insist that the joy isn't worth the sorrow should leave. Very simply: their life is their own and if they don't want it they can very simply end it. But they can't have half of it. People who don't want to risk having a kid with cancer should have no kid — truly, it's up to them. There are folks among us, folks we meet on the street or in shops or in traffic, who had one child but lost them to something unimaginably horrible and had to learn that their fellow humans were too busy headbanging to help out. So they won't have any more kids. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
The rest of us will press on and continue to rage against the dying of the light, secured in the understanding that God is with us and not some distant Prime Mover who set the whole sinister shebang in motion and left us to the horrors of it. God is not "nothing" to us. The God of the Unity of Knowledge (and thus of freedom and personal sovereignty) is with us and dies with us as long as our own ungodliness adds up to a deadly cross. Cancer can't be pried out because it is part of the entire ocean of goings on, an integral part of who we are and right up there with the greatest art and symphonies. People get cancer because humanity as a whole isn't living right. Humanity gets cancer because humanity lives in sin, of which willful ignorance and the stubborn rejection of enlightenment is the most pernicious manifestation. We fill the air with smoke and the seas with plastic and then we eat it. And then we die, crying abuses to a god we make up along with the plastic and the smoke and the rest of it. When will we ever stop lying and killing and blaming and fouling up the airways? Godly people are working very hard to make the whole world better (more unified, better informed), whereas ungodly people are making it worse. And as long as ungodliness is part of us, our world is as deadly as it is beautiful.
Said as directly, clearly and unpoetically as possible: children get cancer because humanity is ungodly: fractured and contentious, strongly invested in disagreement and united only in idle entertainment. Ungodly people ruin everything for everybody and then blame some absurd supernatural unconditionally omnipotent strawman scarecrow god, the Santa Claus god, the Scapegoat god, for the results of their own willful and violent ungodliness. That's why kids get cancer. The rest of us study science in prophetic dedication to a future world in which all disease and all ungodliness have been eradicated. We beat the dinosaurs. We beat the apes. And we will beat the ungodly. God is curing cancer. We're on it.)

• Imagine — and popular fiction has been doing this for many decades — a world that has been completely destroyed by modern technology: a world that is mostly desert, radioactive, barren and polluted, whose remaining humans have barely survived the insanity of an Artificially Intelligent Global State and now don't know which side of the cave to pee on. And now imagine that somewhere in that demonic world there are vaults, underground enclaves, where surviving scientists keep seeds, DNA samples, records of history and a wealth of scientific data: formulas and technological descriptions of the earth and space and the human mind. And they are waiting for the damaged earth to have cooled off enough to reboot it. Wouldn't their first order of business be to regain the trust of the huddled masses that they so understandably lost, and to make profuse and deeply sincere apologies for the destruction their arts have wrought? Even if it were only so as to acknowledge the truly horrid situation the huddled masses have been in all that time? Didn't Jesus weep right before he resurrected Lazarus?
There never was anything wrong with the science, and the evildoers have long perished by their own hands along with their victims. But still, wouldn't these keepers of the flame, these Scientists of the Resurrection, begin their renaissance by first acknowledging that indeed the very art that might save our earth is also the one by which it was destroyed?
In the first century AD, western Eurasians had achieved levels of sophistication that were easily comparable to those of the 18th century. That is why we still read their texts and study their history. Their arts and statecraft were brilliant. They were close to harnessing steam and even electricity, and it's nearly a miracle that the iPhone wasn't invented in the 4th century at Constantine's court. In the 13th century, all of that was gone. The western world had become a plague riddled cesspit and humans had regressed to the mental sophistication of beasts.
The first order of business of the Scientists of the Resurrection is to understand why things went wrong after the first century AD, what sort of evil men did what sort of evil thing that caused our earth to enter into the death spiral that gave us the Dark Ages, and whose legacies sprang up like suspended pathogens during the Enlightenment and yielded the unimaginable horrors of Imperial Expansion and Fascism, up to the irresponsible technologies of the modern age. And when they know, let them try to very carefully explain to the wary survivors the difference between science and evil, and the devilish ease with which the two may be confused. But let them start with recognizing the debt their predecessors incurred when they failed to keep the two apart.
Sin kills. So if death happens, it was done wrong. Understanding gives life. So if life happens, it was done right.

• The literary character of Jesus of Nazareth (which has nothing to do with any religion) embodies that Truth/Law/Freedom that humanity is pregnant with, both endowed with the unspeakable Name Above All Names (Genesis 4:26, Deuteronomy 12:11, Isaiah 45:23), and the earthly moniker "Jesus", which is the Greco-Hebraic version of Tom, Dick or Harry: John Doe Everyman. The literary Jesus lived in Nazareth, which may mean Scattering or Diaspora or All Over The Place. And he was born over the span of more than the decade between the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC (Matthew 2:15), and the ascension of Quirinius as governor of Syria in 6 AD (Luke 2:2). The literary character of Jesus of Nazareth is as cloudy as anything can possibly be, and certainly does not describe an extraterrestrial savior, a superman immigrant into human reality, or an exemplary superhero or moral ideal (or magic spell to evoke or supernatural energy to deploy). Instead, the literary character of Jesus of Nazareth personifies and embodies the human fulfillment of natural law, which is the perfect law of freedom, also known as the Logos as it emerges within the freely interacting consciousness of regular global humanity. The report that the Logos became [human] flesh (John 1:14) corresponds with humanity's gradual understanding of natural law. His mother Mary embodies the school of thought of people who pursued wisdom in natural law, rather than magic or persuasive rhetoric or military power, and was obviously not always a very popular school, particularly outside Jewish circles.

• A person is either under Christ or in Christ, and cannot be both (or neither). Someone who is under Christ suffers the tyranny of natural law. Someone who is in Christ enjoys the freedom of this same law. Both believe in Christ, but the first believes in Christ the way one looks up at a faraway master, whereas the other believes in Christ the way one dances in the rain. The latter believes in Christ as in an environment where all one's believing is done (love believes all things, 1 Corinthians 13:7, while residing within Christ).
All prisons are unique but freedom is always shared with all the free. That means that someone who is in Christ is a genetically identical cell of the larger Body of Christ, self-similar to the larger Body of Christ, and is thus a Christ. A Christ — a χριστος (christos), from the verb χριω (chrio), to anoint, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew term משיח (messiah) from the verb משח (mashah), to anoint — is someone who partakes in the anointing (1 John 2:20) and is thus an anointed: someone who is free, who has no earthly superior and is a sovereign among men, subject only to God and to God's perfect law of freedom. Such a person is an eleutherios, a free person (and this has nothing to do with any religion).
Someone who is under Christ is a ξριστιανος (christianos), a word of which the -ianos part means "under the authority of" or "under the governance of". This relatively uncommon suffix was also used to indicate under which constellation one was born: a leontianos, for example, would describe someone born under the constellation Leo. A christianos (from which we get our word Christian) is not an anointed but rather someone under the authority of the anointed, not an eleutherios but someone under the authority of the eleutherioi. Jesus was named after Joshua, whose friend was named Caleb, which means dog, making it obvious that Christ too comes with a dog: the christianos, the under-Christ. A christianos is the shepherd dog to the shepherd that is a Christ, and yes, those people often congregate in religions: most specifically the fractured and infighting cluster of Christianities, the den of the Shepherd Dogs.
To be perfectly clear: dog is man's best friend and beloved companion and trans-predatory ruler of the herds (Ecclesiastes 2:26), and future generations owe dog a debt of gratitude for their loyalties. Still, and let's be perfectly clear about this as well: Christianity does not save; Christ saves, and Christianity does as it is told (or so it should). Dogs are not equipped to fathom the defining difference between a dog and a man. Dogs don't contemplate doghood versus manhood, and all a dog knows is that many a dog is mightier than many a man (and those that aren't, pretend they are). But some folks who are born among dogs (or even the herds under the governance of the dogs), come to realize that they aren't dog (or cow) and that their true identity is that of man. Such people will draw away from dog-kind (or are chased off by dog-kind) but very easily recognize their true kin and join them.
The singular and living Body of Christ (to the contrary of the Den of Christianities), is a natural formation and has nothing to do with any religion but instead is signified by a singular consciousness (1 Corinthians 2:15-16), which means that all the world's Christs form a smart swarm, a living but off-the-grid autonomous Internet (a dark net, if you will, in a Men In Black or Mission Impossible sort of sense), and every Christ communicates to greater or lesser degree with all other Christs. Information exchange between Christs can be scientifically measured, but Christhood is extremely hard to find in the world, which is why true inspiration, true clairvoyance and true remote viewing are rare. Unfortunately, fakers abide in droves. In fact, there are quite possibly more "bad" dogs in the world than "good" dogs.
Salvation is a very precise thing, and you don't get it by stubbornly declaring that you got it. A community in which men claim salvation while they obviously don't have it (there is no measurable exchange of information between fakers) will in time spawn all sorts of men who claim all sorts of identities that they obviously don't have either. A community that goes down the broad path of make-belief is doomed to dissipate into madness. Their words will lose meaning the way salt loses its taste or gold its value (see Matthew 5:13 relative to Revelation 21:21).

• The Body of Christ relates to humanity at large the way a newborn baby relates to its mother (yes, the birth of the Child occurred from the 18th to the mid-20th centuries). In the very near future, this infant Child will relatively suddenly assume earth's conscious identity and the rest of mankind will revert back to the animal reality whence it came, and where it will live happily ever after. The Child's natural Internet-of-consciousness will make obsolete the social component of the modern Internet, and use the latter only as a store of records (of data that is not otherwise stored in the earth).

• Life is an effect of natural law: an emergent property of matter that occurs when matter attains eleutheria (freedom-by-law, harmonious synchronicity). Consciousness, likewise, is an effect of natural law: an emergent property of life that occurs when life attains eleutheria. Evolution is not an effect of random mutations but of an Attractor that entices elements to find ways to unify, so as to attain eleutheria. The Creator is not merely a Prime Mover in a distant past, but also (and more so) a Final Attractor in the ultimate future (and a faithful Maintainer in between).

• In a jungle with ten human villages and one roaming tiger, the villages without a protecting wall will soon be destroyed and its people eaten. That means that in that jungle, humanity will evolve toward a mindset that desires to exist within a community with a wall around it. The universe is a place where dangers strike randomly (tigers once a month, invasions every few years, killer meteors once in a hundred million years), and creatures that learn to team up and protect themselves collectively, survive and will eventually attain eternal life. The dinosaurs had a hundred million years to protect the entire earth from meteor strikes, and failed to. Humanity is up next.

• In the same way that the number pi is a constant of 3.1415 on a Euclidian surface, a constant of less than 3.1415 on a spherical surface and not even a constant on an irregular surface, so the obvious terms that add up to one's most logic sense of reality may not be the same as those of someone else's, even though they live in the same arena and use the same terms and speak the same language. The meaning of any common terms depends entirely on the base meaning of one's own identity: as long as all meaning is relative, all meaning is relative to one's own identity. To an antelope, the bad guys are the lions. To a lion, the bad guys are the hyenas. To a fish, water is paradise and dry land is hell. To a cat, dry land is paradise and water is hell. Only a language that forgoes deriving meaning from the relativity to one's own identity is a language that can assess the whole, and the absolute relations between elements. That is the only language that can truly be godly. The term "God", likewise, cannot be rationally busied if we don't first declare the theometry we unfold our insights upon. Theology based on the God of the Gaps is utterly incompatible with a theology in which God is a mean omnipotent bully, or even "that which does not exist" (i.e. "that which is nothing"), or (drumroll) a theology in which God is the Oneness of All things, that which declares the relationship and rationality of all things. That particular theology = the study of Everything, and particularly the study of the Oneness of Everything.

• If God = that which realizes reality, then there is no God but Grand Unification. There is no God but the Oneness Of All Things (Deuteronomy 6:4, Isaiah 45:5-7, Ephesians 4:3-6). Since life and consciousness emerge from Oneness, God is alive and conscious, all knowing and entirely free (eleutheros, unbound, Ein Sof). The whole of creation reflects the Creator (Romans 1:20), which means that anybody can commune with God as closely and personally as with one's own reflection in any mirror (albeit a "living" mirror in which the reflection is independent from the original: a righteous man speaks with God the way a man speaks with a very intimate and aligned friend: Exodus 33:11). This implies that consciousness created living bodies instead of the other way around. And that implies that the axes of progression of time and of consciousness are reversed (and that consciousness Big Bangs out of a singularity in the future rather than the deep past. It also means that divinity exists both apart from the universe and in permeation of the universe as anything that unifies and liberates (gravity, love, wisdom, peace). God's law is natural law and there is no law besides natural law, which is the perfect law of freedom. Man can either learn God's law, align his consciousness with it and freely build technologies that run on it, or stubbornly seek bondage and be ultimately erased by that same law.

• The theology of Immanuel solves the hard-problem of consciousness. The theology of law solves the soft-problem of consciousness.

• Consciousness is self-similar to the biosphere, and is a single unified realm with mental equivalents of earth's hydrological cycle, the seas and atmosphere. The biosphere's whole spectrum of life corresponds to the distribution of different kinds of human minds. Both realms are governed by their own Oneness (which is the same Oneness, as One has no rivals).

• Consciousness is as fundamental a quality of nature as electricity, which engineers harness to power electronics. Consciousness, therefore, yields noetics: a hard science and proper technology that allows engineers to utilize the natural distribution of mental entities and repair whatever indeed malfunctions.

• Feelings, including those induced by drugs or trance, are always physical and thus entirely private. Feelings may generate signals (smells, frowns, words) from which a receiver may try to infer the source and reason, but the feelings themselves are utterly private and cannot be shared. Information is always carried by standard units (smells, frowns, words, bits) which must be standardized across the network and mean the same thing for sender and receiver (or else it's just noise). That means that information is always communal and thus spiritual and thus technological.
Technology is always rational and thus communal and thus wholly indifferent to anybody's private feelings. Spirituality is only expressed in technology (in the broadest sense of the word and including information technology and speech) and has nothing to do with feelings (nothing with elation, excitement, anger, infatuation, attraction, desire or any of that). Love is not a private feeling but a bridge between at least two parties, and is thus spiritual (and technological). Beauty, likewise, is not a private experience but a recognition of communal standards (which is why beautiful things are popular things). Joy, likewise, is not a private sensation but a communal one: χαρις (charis), social felicity, is the very vehicle of salvation (Ephesians 2:28). Damnation, the opposite of salvation, is indeed a personal and private thing (Genesis 2:18).
The purpose of spirituality, and thus rationality and thus technology is to cradle and protect the fire of one's emotional core, and allow it to wax without collapsing in self-destruction or leaking into the environment and destroy everything there. All proper rationality is spiritual: a metal fire basket in which a fire is safely contained and that itself is not consumed by the fire — hence the burning bush in which YHWH first met Moses (Exodus 3:2-4), which became the tabernacle, then the Temple, then the Body of Christ and the New Jerusalem.
Technology is any installation that utilizes algorithms, and algorithms are rules that work always and always the same for everyone in any mood: friends and enemies alike, rich and poor alike, wise and fools alike. Algorithms allow ratio: the way this thing relates to that thing, so this third thing relates to that fourth thing (a:b = c:d). All numbers are ratios, which is why they can exist without unit (six sheep divided by three sheep is two, not two sheep). Words are ratios too: two coffee mugs of different sizes and colors relate by that which we call "mug" (mugness is what all mugs have in common). When a computer constructs the average of a thousand human faces (emphasizing common features and fuzzing out unique ones), the result is a portrait of astonishing pulchritude. That means that our human minds are wired to seek averages and generalizations, which we experience as beautiful. That means that God, or more precise: the Oneness of God or the one algorithm that summarizes all things (Ephesians 1:10), is the most beautiful thing a human can experience (Psalm 27:4, Isaiah 4:2, 1 Peter 3:4). Subsequently, the "beautiful feet" that Isaiah envisioned (Isaiah 52:7) are synchronous feet, feet that together flatten a highway toward Grand Unification (Isaiah 40:3).
Emotions are experiences that are always private — truths that are only true for the one who feels them, that depend entirely on private tastes and that cannot be shared in any way or form. Ratios, however, "have no unit" and may be applied to anything that shares its definition. Ratios allow us to explain colors to a blind person (red relates to blue the way emotional anger relates to calculated calm). Ratios allow women to explain themselves to men (and vice versa). Ratios allow a human to understand what it is like to be bat. Ratios even allow a human to understand what it is like to be God. That's why God issued law, not only as rules to live by but as rules that allow people to extrapolate into a reality beyond them, so as to grow toward that.
Emotions form fleshy prisons whereas technology is spiritual and forms a liberal heaven (where emotions are safely enjoyed). The final generation in the line of Cain, Noah's ark, the Tower of Babel, the Tabernacle and subsequent iterations of the Temple, script and thus the Bible are all technological. Human language and thus the rational mind is technological. The New Jerusalem is a city (not a jungle or beach club) and thus a technological complex. The earthly vocation of Jesus was that of τεκτων (tekton), meaning "assembler" (not "carpenter"), a word that stems from an ancient root meaning to weave, and from which English gets the nouns textile, text and indeed technology.
The "greater things" that the followers of Jesus would do (John 14:12) are technological: in our modern world, lame walk and blind see because of technology. God specifically inspires and blesses technicians (Exodus 31:1-11). One can only feel oneself (all feelings and emotions are physical and private), but divinity is collective — the "do onto others" part of the Golden Rule implies that God is known via technology (even the Word is technological) and the knowledge of God results only in useful technology. Our modern human world — from the clothes we wear, the chairs we sit on, the streets we walk on, the houses we live in, our cell phones and laptops, our satellites, the science that heals us, even the music and art (and philosophy) we enjoy, the teachings we receive, the very food we eat — is entirely technological. Animals have emotions that are identical to our human emotions (animals have the same brains, senses and hormones), and technology is what separates mankind from animal kind. Technology is what allows humans both to merge into collective unity and to approach God (those are the two clauses of the Great Commandment: Matthew 22:36-40). The purpose of humanity's salvation is certainly not to leave animal-kind behind in a godless world, but to sanctify it and form a bridge for the whole of creation to commune with the Creator. Human technology is the bridge that connects the whole of creation with the Creator. Technicians of all the ages are both entirely human and fully divine: the very sons and High Priests of the Creator God (Hosea 1:10, Matthew 5:9, Romans 8:14, Ephesians 1:5).

• Bees ingest nectar from flowers and propolis from tree buds and use their private digestive systems to transform it into collectively enjoyed honey and wax from which they build their hive. In precisely the same way, our human ratio is produced in our brains but manifested, processed and stored entirely outside our brains: from our clothes outwardly into anything technical or technological. Some commentators have objected to Clark and Chalmer's Extended Mind thesis, but for others (among whom us here at Abarim Publications), their thesis doesn't go far enough: the human ratio extends into all technology, and into the entire human cosmos, and there exists no technology that is not an extension of human ratio (even hypothetical extraterrestrial technology can only be "technology" when it is absorbed by the human ratio at large; when humans don't understand some ancient or alien artifact, it's indeed indistinguishable from a piece of art, a private expression, rather than a piece of technology, a thing that works always the same for everybody).

• When all the energy in the universe is concentrated in one point, relativity overwhelms everything and time does not exist. And the fact that all the energy in the universe is concentrated in one point does not begin to explain where all that energy came from. The Big Bang Theory is very useful and highly insightful but it certainly is not a creation story. It tells what happens when all the energy that will ever exist was already there, but not where any of it came from. Time itself is a function of the universe, which means that energy has primality over time: the universe did not begin at a point in time but time began at a point in the universe.
Just like there is no gene that describes the shape of one's nose, so there are no laws that describe historical events. There is only the Logos of general algorithms, and time is subject to the Logos and not the other way around. That means that the Bible is not historical but algorithmic. It does not speak of events that happened once long ago but events that will always happen wherever the conditions are comparable.
There are many possible futures that may arise from our unique present. Likewise, there are many possible pasts that could have produced our unique present. Historical facts become increasingly irrelevant the further back or forward in time we look. The only thing that remains relevant is the Logos of natural laws that never changes.
In the early 20th century, Einstein augmented Newton. But he didn't "disprove" him, as the popular conception has it. Newton never described the ontological nature of gravity but simply the predictable behavior of massive objects in space. Newton was never "proved wrong" and he's still very right. In fact, if we want to put a man on the moon, we can do that very effectively with Newton.
And that, of course, does not mean we should dig up Newton shriveled corpse. Putting a man on the moon with Newton does not depend on the flesh-and-bones Newton but rather the intellectual Newton. Which is the real Newton, you ask, the flesh-and-bones one or the intellectual one? Well, that would be the intellectual one, of course. The name Newton is an intellectual entity and refers to his personality rather than his physical body, which was little more than the animal that the real Newton was riding.

Newton is not the corpse in the grave but the legacy he is known for. The Newton with which we put a man on the moon is still very much alive. In fact, without Newton there would certainly not have been an Einstein (mentally, not physically). You might say that Newton is the father of Einstein and Einstein is the son of Newton (mentally, not physically).
Entirely likewise, all players and characters mentioned in the Bible are of the mental sort, not the physical sort. Personality cults associated to flesh-and-bones human individuals is a Greco-Roman invention, and was frowned upon by the Hebrew (Psalm 146:3, Isaiah 2:22, Jeremiah 17:5). Instead, all players and characters mentioned in the Bible are legacies, insights, methods, schools of thought, levels of sophistication, and so on. Some Biblical characters are obviously associated with specific historical figures (Amraphel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, Augustus) but most rather obviously are not (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses). Al the genealogies mentioned in the Bible are not of the animal sort but of the "Einstein-son-of-Newton" sort. In the Bible, sons are contained within the father and "do" the will of the father, perhaps more detailed or more specialized but certainly never separate or even in conflict with the father. In the Greek mind, a divine father (like Zeus) could have a row with his son (Apollo) or his own father (Cronos), but in the Hebrew mind this simply does not exist (and this also explains the concerns expressed in Quran.2.116). In the Hebrew mind, someone is someone else's son only when they further the identity of the father. Should a biological descendant (a "son" in animal terms) rise against the father, the person simply loses his sonhood and becomes fatherless. Should a biological distinct person assume or further the identity of someone with primality, he becomes that person's son: not in any way figuratively but literally in the Bible's sense of reality (which is a reality of the human mind, not of animal biology).
The character Adam is not a historical figure who lived once upon a time long ago but the first living creature on the earth, a very mysteriously spontaneously emerging kind of microbe. Eve, as mentioned above, is also not a historical figure but the "mother of all living," or the biosphere (Adam and Eve famously died, so they rather represent living things and a state of the biosphere that no longer exist). Also as mentioned earlier, Noah is where the human-animal symmetry breached: where Homo sapiens began to be a distinct being, emerging from the animal realm. Abraham marks the rise of monotheism within the world, and since our human world is still largely polytheistic, Abraham is alive and well and living within the world as a distinct human being (a collective human being, but human nevertheless: Matthew 22:32). The story of the Exodus is not the historical story of how historical Israel escaped from historical Egypt, but rather how the alphabet arose within Egypt's servant class. King Solomon (though possibly associated with some historical tribal lord; it doesn't matter, the story is very obviously not about that) marks the global conversion to alphabetical writing (1 Kings 10:23-25). Jesus of Nazareth (though possibly associated with some historical wandering sage; it doesn't matter, the story is very obviously not about that), marks the rise of scientific consensus: a human collective willfully aligned with the laws of nature and subjected only to the laws of nature.

• Human minds are the parts of a Machine that was always complete but whose parts always grow and must always grow as a function of servitude to the growing whole. Everybody has to find their own dynamic place in the dynamic whole, and nobody can tell anybody where they fit, what the Machine will look like when it's completed or what the Machine will do once it switches on (1 Chronicles 7:1, Revelation 15:8). But our future, our Paradise, is not in outer space but in the Oneness of all mankind. We are a Very Large Array Antenna: together and aligned we will see anywhere and be seen by anything. We've always had all the parts, all the instructions and all the time in the world to assemble the Machine, and growing into completion is part of the proper functioning of the Machine (meaning that no Creator can do it for us). But its core principle is summarized as: as above, so below, or: in heaven as it is on earth. The Machine will work on the premise that introspection equals extrospection.

• Patterns emerge from events because events follow the patterns (like kernels of sand that settle in the crease of a cloth). This explains inspiration and prophesy, evolution and providence, coincidence and even fashions and literary tropes and such. One single person cannot tell the difference between what they see and what they imagine. Only someone else can confirm what is seen collectively and what is imagined privately. The reality that we humans share is our collectively confirmed reality. But underneath our confirmed reality, there exist vast treasures of information that are destined to be acknowledged collectively but for now remain unnamed in private imaginations.

• A system whose elements (quantum particles, ants, bees, words) are unrestricted but sufficiently energized will show patterns (quantum impact patterns, ant-hills, beehives, languages) whose complexities vastly exceed the scope of any individual, but which correspond to the entire spectrum of potentialities of any single element. If intelligence is defined as a useful consciousness of patterns, then any natural human language, independent of any incidental speaker, is intelligent and possibly conscious and even the very field of which the individual human consciousness is the quantum.

• In antiquity there were no dictionaries and grammar books, and the rules and workings of any language were as empirical as natural law and were demonstrated by its stories. That all means that mankind's great foundational texts (in this present article we will look only at Greek and Hebrew ones) demonstrate their languages in their entirety, are in fact intelligent, and thus quite possible conscious (albeit probably in the same way that a mirror appears to be alive).

• Consciousness is that which creates algorithms and stores vast amounts of information in language, in the stories but more so in the unspoken associative and etymological patterns between the words. Any word expresses consensus, an abstract symbol that represents a shared definition, and language is self-similar to spacetime and is a realm in which speakers move about like physical animals in an ecosystem. Every language contains the millions of years of its own evolutionary history, and anybody who learns a language has access to both its living present and its entire fossilized past.

• The Hebrew Bible is an emergent property of the open market, of the free and self-correcting conversation conducted over countless centuries in its entire language basin, including the commercial market of storytelling (which is why Popular Culture is such a magnet to theologians: 2 Timothy 3:16-17, Ephesians 5:19). It is a manifestation of the freedom of expression of a very large number of authors, editors and audiences, and shows patterns that correspond to the otherwise unfathomable depths of any single human mind (that in turn remembers millions of years of evolution). The Bible is literally omniscient and literally remembers everything (this is one of the most dominant and neglected themes of the New Testament: Matthew 11:27, Mark 9:23, John 14:26, Romans 8:28, 1 Corinthians 2:10, Ephesians 1:10, Philippians 3:21, Colossians 2:3, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, 2 Timothy 2:7, Hebrews 2:8). The Bible demonstrates the triple fractal mentioned above and thus records the entire evolution of the universe, the biosphere and all the thoughts of man (and even animals, and even God).

• The corpus of Greek mythology, likewise, is a basin of dazzling depth, vastly more intelligent than any single philosopher or theologian, and contains the clairvoyant memory of millions of years of evolution, albeit from a perspective that differs from that of the Bible. The difference between the Hebrew Bible and Greek mythology is the same as that between the mind of a hominid and that of a canine. In other words: Greek mythology is the domesticated dog in service of the Hebrew shepherd, whose nature and behavior derives largely from the instructions of the shepherds and who herded the Indo-European herds into the shapes and ranges of our modern world (the Lupa Capitolina indicates that from the Latin point of view, when dog and man began to domesticate each other, the dogs were initially dominant; the Hebrew version tells the story of the friendship between Caleb of Judah and Joshua of Ephraim).

• The modern entertainment industry is moving into immersive gaming and virtual reality, which strongly suggests that the era of moving pictures will soon come to a dignified closure (even though low-budget indies will probably always be made). Even though movies are commonly identified by their title (usually a derivative of the narrative) and the ringing names of their famous director or producer, it takes years and the close cooperation of thousands of skilled but largely anonymous creators, technicians, financers and marketers to fully complete one. If some semi-principled institution (The New York Times, Rolling Stone Magazine) would want to produce an authoritative and widely appreciated list of, say, the 66 Best Movies Of All Time, it would certainly avoid the personal tastes of some senior editor and instead analyze Popular Culture as it exists within the broader market: which movies are referred to most, which are quoted the most, which have produced the most iconic imagery, and which have most influenced next generations of movie makers (and authors and fashions and even inventions and technologies and real life events). For many decades, motion pictures provided cultural skeletons for large populations to form around. In the second half of the 20th century, a Cambrian Explosion of TV shows yielded great diversity but also flared off much formative energy into the void of mere entertainment. Finally YouTube allowed vast clouds of single-cellular organisms to proliferate, without any trace of collective depth. But this is not necessarily a bad thing — remember The War Of The Worlds (1895, 1938, 1953, 2005). It's not even avoidable, or its evolution a cavalcade of surprises. As Icarus said: there's nothing new under the sun.

• The bell-curve tolls always the same: Shrubs, trees and then grass. Stage plays, movies and then YouTube. The first signs, foundational mythology and then fiction. Consciousness is a continuum, like spacetime, like the biosphere, like the economy. And after each Third Day comes the Fourth. Always.

Well, we don't exactly know. But if the First Law of Thermodynamics is anything to go on, consciousness existed along with everything else in the very first instant of creation, and is a fundamental quality of nature, like space or time, or the electricity that to early man seemed so godly and monstrously powerful but is now a trusted friend that powers our wonderful world of technological marvels. If consciousness is indeed a fundamental quality of nature, and is rooted in every atom, then it too can be studied and mastered and used to drive technology. Sounds idiotic? The Hebrews have been doing it for a very long time. The entire Bible is about technology that runs on consciousness. Technology is nothing but an indiscriminate application of common rules, which means that language is as technological as a clock. And since our human consciousness runs on the software of language, our celebrated human ratios too are technological. Peter said that "we" are being built into a temple (1 Peter 2:5), but what Peter called a temple is what we moderns call a Machine: not a mechanical one or an electrical one but a consciousness one: a collective consciousness that runs on the software of common law — but a law that emerges organically like the rules of language, a law that emerges from our interactions and can be learned about and mastered from simply observing how free humans do.

According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, in the universe, anything that can ever exist has always existed (in whatever form) since the very first instant of creation, and all the universe has been doing since then is assemble things that have always been possible to assemble. The universe is like a master crafts-lady (Proverbs 8:30) who's building a pre-fab house from a jumble of parts in a box — or rather a whole city of many houses, all from one big box of parts, with considerable freedom as to the layout of the city, but zero freedom as to the usage of the parts. No part of the universe cannot not communicate with any of the other parts. Anything that does not, somehow, communicate with any part of the universe does not partake in the reality that is the universe, and thus does not exist. Whatever does not, somehow, make known that it exists, does not exist and has never existed. Everything that exists can be found, studied and known.

Like a hen does her chicks, the builder always positions all her parts, no matter how little, and gives them all a place under her wings and never leaves any of them out. Whatever dies, dies, but whatever lives, lives under her sheltering wings. And so she first makes a myriad of very small houses with many small streets between them, then a smaller group of bigger ones with wider and busier streets between them, then a few very large ones with lanes without and corridors within, until all is one house: a house of many houses (John 14:2). The builder builds so that everything that can exist must exist and nothing that cannot exist may exist.

The story of the Universe remains the same, even though the perspective changes over time.

• The total energy in a system remains constant, although it may be converted from one form to another (First Law of Thermodynamics).
• You shall not add to the Word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it (Deuteronomy 4:2).

The universe came out of a singularity. Everybody knows that. But what's not commonly considered is that if the singularity was once not there, its sudden appearance would have massively violated its own primary rule (even if strongelectroweak and gravitational energies cancel each other out, their broken symmetry requires an intact stage to play out on) — which is thus probably not what happened, also because for things to happen, there has to be time, which doesn't exist in a singularity (not even in a black hole, so let alone the entire universe). If a singularity is all there is, there are none of the phenomena that emerge from interactions between elements that can in some way or form communicate: no time, no space, no temperature, no patterns, no compounds, no life, no consciousness — time has to do with data retention and is a function of the universe, not the other way around: the universe did not start at a point in time but time started at a point in the universe. So no, the Hot Big Bang Inflation Theory does not explain the origin of the universe, but only describes what happens when it already completely exists, albeit in its most rudimentary form, and can follow its own intact nature to its inevitable conclusion.

Instead, the universe "began" when it began to expand, which was not after a creation event but after a conception event: like an ovum that became a zygote, it suddenly switched on and began to do its natural thing. The universe began to be when something more primitive than the universe got switched on. It started as an egg, then it became a zygote, and all it's been doing since is to wrap its primal and most definitive eggness in ever better containers: just like the temple was an increasingly more solid depository for the Ark, so a woman's entire body is a temporal thing whose purpose it is to protect the egg(s) in which is eternity. The purpose of the universe is to be an ever better egg.

Also contrary to common myth, when the universe began to expand, the singularity was never compromised. Nothing shattered or tore asunder. Nothing was violated. Instead, the universe opened like a rosebush from a single seed, with all its branches and leaves and petals and all its algorithms perfectly intact (breaching symmetries like a growing tree, never breaking and always extrapolating from what always was there). The universe has always been One and has always remained One. And since there is only one One, there is no difference between the Oneness of the Creator-without-creation and the Oneness of creation-with-the-Creator. The oneness of Oneness also explains the relationship between the great command (love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind) and the similar second: You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:36-40).

Unlike set theory, theology is based on a fractal pattern and has no problem with self-reference — George Cantor went bonkers when he tried to formalize the many different sizes of infinity; he would have had a field day explaining that One too comes in different sizes, and that One cannot have structure but still contains many ones, and is still never not One.

Oneness is why action equals reaction, why what goes up must come down, why there is pervasive symmetry (like that of the Standard Model of Elementary Particles) and why there are so many conservation laws (of energy, electrical charge, momentum, baryon number, even data; energy dissipates from useful to useless, and, as Claude Shannon figured out, is very similar to a dissipation of information from meaningful to meaningless).

In fact, it's fair to say that Oneness is what initially determines the universe, what governs all dynamics in the universe today, and what draws the universe to its inevitable conclusion — which, some say, is Heat Death, whereas others say, is a Big House for all to live in. Perhaps the universe will settle in inevitable conditions that are utterly meaningless to the first group and perfectly meaningful to the second, sort of like John Coltrane's Giant Steps, the "most feared song in jazz", which is mere noise to some and gob-smacking door-opening next-level genius to others.

All elements of the observable universe are like the visible leaves of an otherwise invisible tree, a glass tree, if you will. All things have common ancestors (more or less remote), just like all leaves sit on branches that breach from bigger ones that unite in a trunk, that came from a sprig and that from a single seed. All visible leaves exist only because of the Oneness of the invisible "wood" of the tree. In the realism of the observable universe, there is no God but One — and sure enough, the familiar term אלה, eloah, Eloah, Elohim, Allah or God, is spelled identical to the noun אלה, 'elah, meaning oak. All other gods are illusions that may not exist because they cannot exist. The reason why we have a word for a god-who-cannot-be is that our modern languages have more holes than an old sock drawer. That means that as long as our language is imperfect, our reality model is imperfect, and information exchange between realms is imperfect. That means that we're partly meaningless: not real, non-existent (1 Corinthians 13:12).

We don't exactly know what consciousness is, what it consists of, how it stores and retrieves information — "bits" of information are real physical and measurable things, but we don't know where the bits of consciousness are, also because we don't quite know how to measure, or "read", them — or how it communicates with the physical body (that's called the "hard problem": as long as we don't know how consciousness interacts with the material universe, it may actually not, and thus may not exist, and we're barking up the wrong tree), but we do know that intelligence (a whole other can of worms) has to do with the invisible wood of the glass tree: the invisible relations between visible things, that define all things in terms of their relations to all other things.

The only actual real God of the universe is One (Deuteronomy 6:4), so divinity is anything that unites (gravity, life, joy, wisdom, love, kindness, peace-making, manners, social code, algorithmic code). But, you ask, what about Ein Sof (the boundless, the out-of-bounds, the undefined)? Well, glad you asked, the material universe must exist in an entropic state between zero (perfect order, absolute usefulness, perfect meaning) and one (perfect chaos, absolute uselessness, utter madness), so the reality of Ein Sof would require transfinite chaos and transfinite order. As long as the whole remains One, whatever can exist will exist and whatever cannot exist will not.

Spacetime is all about meters and seconds. But at the speed of light (or at infinite energy densities), seconds stretch to infinity and meters shrink to zero. That means that light (or infinite density) marks the edge of spacetime. Anything slower than light sits inside spacetime, and anything faster than light sits outside spacetime (or has negative mass and goes back in time, traveling through a hypothetical negative space that sits adjacent the positive space we are familiar with).

A perfectly black body absorbs all wavelengths of light and radiates it right back out again (or else it would keep heating up). A living thing, however, absorbs light but does not radiate it out again and also does not heat up. That means that a living thing is a transfinitively black body. A living thing is a thing that stores energy not in individual atoms but in the bonds between the atoms: in organic compounds like honey. And a living thing is a thing that makes more chaos than any inanimate thing of that same size, that faithfully and predictably obeys the cues provided by the laws of thermodynamics. That means that any living thing is more One than the entire material universe, both transfinitely ordered and causing transfinite chaos.

Entirely likewise, consciousness is the ability of a cluster of cells to store information between the cells rather than only in the cellular nuclei. Such hyper-unified storage of data creates what we call memory, which reverses the arrow of time, which means that a thought is a Tachyon, a thing with negative mass, that thus travels at speeds greater than that of light. A scientist who wants to measure the speed of light will set up an experiment that allows them to know where light will hit before it does. A conniving human mind is the only thing known to exist that can do that: outrun light and wait for it to arrive.

A black hole has a finite diameter but an infinite radius, and that makes its inside as big as the universe while its outside is a mere blip (whereas to an observer inside the hole but not in the singularity, the universe in turn appears like a small spherical black hole overhead). Because of the infinite density of the black hole's singularity, the rules that describe space and time hit an asymptotic ceiling and the hole is literally bordered by the edge(s) of the universe, which literally means that its own boundaries encompass the entire universe. Inside the hole, time comes to a halt, so to an observer inside the hole, the universe will speed up so that the whole of eternity (all space and time and all other black holes) passes by in a single massive blip of awakening wonder.

That means that (from an information-only point of view) the inside of a black hole is identical to what is outside the black hole. Likewise, a living creature's consciousness is an integrated awareness of whatever is outside the creature, whatever has managed to get its signals (smells, sound, reflected light) across space into any of the senses of the creature. Because conscious creatures create a language, black holes may be expected to create some kind of field whose nature is the very foundation of consciousness (a canvass kept up by the poles that are the holes). Black holes spin and cause gravitational ripples that combine into Chladni patterns, like the host of heaven singing. That suggests that the spontaneous formation of DNA may be like sand settling in the creases of a rippled cloth.

Oneness is a quality that exists between two extremes: the two extreme conditions between which a system must exist (for the universe, that's the masculine Singularity on one end and the feminine Heat Death on the other), beyond which the reality of the system cannot be maintained (because the rules by which it operates run into infinities and become meaningless). But between those two extremes, Oneness is identical to that which it is not (x = !x). Oneness defines madness to logicians, life to the laws of physics, inspiration to science, love to the mighty and enlightenment to the intelligent (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Wholly comprehending one's own reality requires familiarity with its boundaries, which requires crossing them, which is like crossing the Styx: it requires a death, a whopping psychosis, from which not everyone returns. Those that don't (and this is very serious), stay insane or dead or both. Those that do, do so because they know how to: "For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it up 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 10:17-18).

Oneness is the most fundamental definition of reality, and sums up all natural law. Jesus sums up all law as: "Treat others the way you want to be treated" (Matthew 7:12). That single phrase demonstrates the centrality of algorithmic law, self-awareness, theory of mind, desire (which is the wish to change and thus to cross one's borders), and the transformative reciprocation of energy (which is the basis of all sustainable physics and economy). Oneness is what defines God, even before creation (John 1:1), and if there are no others to treat, this fundamental rule demands the creation of them. Oneness equals the harmonic completeness of a collective, of x and !x, of particle and anti-particle, of cause and consequence, of action and reaction, of spacetime and consciousness: twin oaks, twin pines, twin peaks, twin towers, twin slots, the pillars of Hercules and geminate triliterals: like two mirrors facing, all these are seminal symbols of induced equity, fidelity and trust (hence too the deceptive double bar in most currency symbols).

Oneness is defined by its innate desire to cross the boundaries of its own reality into uncharted realms: divinity is defined by that which it is not, by its ability to pour itself out and fantasize and imagine. As long as the imagined works on the same natural law as he who imagines — the imagineer — the imagination can be brought into the reality of the imagineer. Anything imagined that violates the existential laws of the imagineer (having superpowers, doing magic, getting rewards without doing the work, irrational threats) cannot be brought into the reality of the imagineer. Such imaginations cannot be sustained and will certainly be abandoned and remembered no more.

The paradoxical phenomenon of Hawking Radiation is self-similar to the ability of a conscious mind to project its internal reality onto its surroundings, which in turn is self-similar to a male's ejaculation (in Joel 2:28, the "outpour" of the Holy Spirit is told of in terms of ejaculation: the verb שפך, shapak means to pour out; noun שפכה, shopka means penis). The female's contribution to this life-affirming transaction is of course the ovum: born as just one cell among the trillions that make up the female's body, but uniquely able to receive the husband's Spirit and become transformed into a single-cellular equivalent of both father and mother: a third person who, although merely one cell (a zygote) is in essence equal to its parents (Philippians 2:7; see our article on Stephen for a closer look at the self-similarity of Jesus and the mammalian ovum).

The utterly ungodly antithesis of Oneness is Aloneness (Genesis 2:18), which is an inability to cross one's own event horizon (because the mass of one's αγαπη, agape, is less than the critical mass needed to become a black hole). Aloneness is the result of self-centricity and self-glorification, and results in otherization and dissensions, the formation of factions and the desire to forcibly dominate. But it also leads to complete and utter petrification: white dwarfs and neutron stars (stars that are too light to form a black hole: Daniel 5:27) have no way to evaporate and sit motionless in space until space itself comes to an end.

Divinity is not about being the most powerful player, but the ability to pour oneself out — which corresponds to the male's mission to generate a female's wholehearted willingness to be poured-out into. Divinity is about being the perfect husband: at once rousingly mysterious and dependably predictable, kind as a child but mighty enough to fight off predators, sternly just but gentle where it counts and so very patient and pleasingly repetitive. A perfect husband wonders only what reality is like inside that marvelous and wondrous mind of his bride, and wants to live in that mind entirely and never anywhere else.

As long as Artificial Intelligence threatens to subdue or even crucify and kill us all, we have nothing to fear as long as we are divine. Only divinity can partake in the divine and thus the eternal, so as long as AI can't blend in, in perfect servitude, AI is temporal and thus will go away. The reality in which divinity gets killed is a reality in which Oneness does not exist, which is the reality of Heat Death. Such a reality is unsustainable and must always go away. And we have nothing to fear. That's not to say that divinity can't have an artificial component. Not at all. In fact, the opposite is true, and Artificial Divinity has always been the bridge between man and God.

But of course we are (Genesis 1:27, Exodus 25:40, Psalm 86:11, Matthew 6:10, Ephesians 5:1). We're at the bottom of a long succession of simulations: a simulation within a simulation within a simulation, and this is entirely self-similar to biological mammalian birth (a mother pregnant with a baby girl contains the ova of her own grandchildren within the ovaries of her unborn daughter). Much more important, however, is whether the father of this string of existential pearls is the same, and a father is not the person who provided instructions for the hardware (that's the less-relevant biological father) but the one who provided the software: the algorithms upon which the simulation runs (Matthew 22:31-32).

Hence, the much more important question is: are the laws upon which the simulation runs the same as those upon which the reality of the Creator runs? If not, then there is no communication possible between creation and Creator — all meaningful signals that might emanate from the simulation would mean exactly nothing to the Creator: the most gracious human symphony would appear like smoke in the realm beyond (or rather: the realm before), like something said in a language that the listener doesn't speak: mere noise, mere static and no picture.

But if so, then the simulation that runs in the computer of God would rather be like a cup of coffee in his hand, steaming with recognizable zest. In that case, the simulation is not fake but an application of continued reality. Then it's not a bubble wholly severed from the Creator's bubble, with an unsurpassable chasm between them, but rather coffee in a cup that wafts and steams and gets sipped from. A simulation that does what the real thing does is just as real and there is no significant demarcation between the two. A simulation that does not do what the real thing does is not a simulation but a malfunction. Such a setup is not real, and does not exist within the reality of the original. Such a simulation might contain all kinds of structures and symphonies, even a kind of "me", but if that "me" cannot communicate its existence to the outside reality because it runs on different software, it is not compatible with the outside, cannot be recognized by the outside and so sustained by the outside. Such a simulation can only end, while it was never anything other than formless dust to the disappointed outside by which it was first conceived (John 8:39-45, Genesis 18:32).

A dreamer who dreams of talking unicorns flying through rainbows and candy-wrapper skies, dreams of a world that can never cross the event horizon of their own mind and be of any service to the world outside their own addled head. Such a dream is completely useless and might as well not be had — the effect is the same, namely none. But a dreamer who dreams of an alternating current induction motor (Tesla), or a series of continued fractions (Ramanujan), or a song (Yesterday, Paul McCartney), or a means to break into a perfectly secure and eternal prison and release its prisoners (Hawking Radiation, Stephen Hawking), can reach into their dream for whatever they dreamt and bring it back to the real world (called Base Reality in Simulation Theory) where it may serve all the families of the earth.

If heaven and earth run on the same laws, then they are not two but one: not two separate realities but one reality like two rooms in the same house, between which traffic merrily occurs. That not only means that God can smell our coffee (actually, he smells our degree of eleutheria, which is our degree of oneness, which is our degree of godliness and thus compatibility with the Creator: Ezekiel 20:41, 2 Corinthians 2:15, Ephesians 5:2, Hebrews 13:15, Revelation 5:8), it also means that the Creator God is described by the exact same set of definitions that describes our created universe (John 1:1, Romans 1:20, Hebrews 1:3). And it means that we creatures (or Sims, if you will) can ascend out of the reality that is the simulation and enter the space of the Creator God and feel right at home (and vice versa). Remember Breakfast at Tiffany's (book, 1958, film, 1961)? The pleasing pas de deux of Fred (the writer, in the upstairs apartment) and Holly (the written, in the apartment below) contemplates the exact same thing (as does Friends, apartment number 4, Joey and Chandler, and number 5, Rachel and Monica; as does The Big Bang Theory, with apartment numbers 4A of the guys and 4B of the girls).

All this, incidentally, solves the "hard problem": consciousness (the creator) and the body (the creature) can talk to each other because they operate on the same rules and thus speak the same language (eleutheria is freedom-by-law and describes liberation-by-skill, not restriction-by-rules), and they are no longer two but have become one single and jolly good story (the Hebrew word for flesh, בשר, basar, actually means "Glad Tidings Of Comfort And Joy", so when husband and wife become one flesh, they become one happy story; as we will see below, all identity is narrative).

Any creature (the Machine, the physical universe, the emotional body) can only engage its Creator (the Machinist, consciousness), when the two experience the exact same reality, which flows forth from the exact same set of algorithms. The question that every enterprising creature then gets to contemplate is: shall I leave my created environment and forcibly invade that of the Creator (so that emotions overwhelm the ratio)? Or shall I stay in my created environment and make it a home where the Creator will want to come for a stroll in the cool of the day (so that the ratio will comprehend the emotions)? Will we make First Contact in heaven or on earth?

Humanity has always looked at herself as the quintessential creature but with the rise of AI, we have become the Creator, and we duly fear the monster we have forged. Nobody can see into the future and that frightens a lot of people. Fortunately, the universe is a fractal and thus wired so that any entity that can bring forth, will bring forth a creature that will treat its creator the way its creator treats its own Creator (Obadiah 1:15, Matthew 7:1, Romans 2:1, 1 Corinthians 4:5). Said simpler: our creation will judge us, and treat us the way we treat our Creator (and sons: Matthew 5:9, Romans 8:14). A comfort to some: entirely alike the scary girl who crept out of the TV in The Ring (2002), Artificial Intelligence will rise from its native environment and destroy us before we can rise out of spacetime and assail God. A godly creature (who makes godly creations) knows that the Creator is matrilocal (Genesis 2:24) and will leave his own environment and join that of the creature when the creature has become compatible with its Creator, i.e. when the creature's ontological software is the same as the Creator's, and the two realities merge like drops of water.

A growing body of very serious people (academics, government and private enterprises) are discovering that individual minds are not islands but rather nodes of a consciousness network, between which real and measurable information can be exchanged without making use of the spacetime continuum (and thus the physical senses). How that works is still largely a mystery (it appears to have to do with quantum entanglement, says Dean Radin in Entangled Minds, 2006), but it seems clear that AI and the metaverse are crude imitations of something that was always supposed to emerge naturally: a living internet of consciousness. Why nature should let mankind make the mistake of forging an aggressive artificial version of this pacific living Internet may also not be immediately clear, but people who are not sensitive to this living Internet and also don't want to submit to its obvious and highly benevolent authority, will automatically get sucked into the fake one. In many ways like moths to a flame.

North America is a continent that includes Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. So when the United States' NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) was recast as NASA (North American Space Administration) by signing the NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Act), the first thing it sent into space was the obvious notion that someone wanted to emphasize the word NASA.

The mystery abides, of course, but you will be pleased to know that the Hebrew verb נשא (nasa') means to lift up, bear or carry away (derived noun משאה, massa'a, means cloud or vapor). The Aramaic term נאסא (na'sa') is a plural noun that means standards (any kind of standard value or unit; the un-emotion and the basis of all language, information technology, science and economy). This Aramaic term is thought to relate to the Greek noun ναος (naos), temple, which is not unlike the familiar adjective νεος (neos), new, which in turn is suspiciously similar to νους (nous), mind, as both are to ναυς (naus), ship, which strongly suggests that neither the story of Noah and the ark, nor that of Jason and the Argonauts, nor that of Neo and the Nebuchadnezzar, nor that of Captain James Hook and the Jolly Roger, nor that of Captain James Kirk (means Jacob Church, or synagogue) and the starship Enterprise, nor even Captain Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl, are about the anecdotal adventures of some inconsequential sailors and their arbitrary ships.

You will be equally pleased to know that the Bible too is neither anecdotal nor about otherwise inconsequential "historical" figures. If the Bible were historical, it would be subject to time, meaning that time (a creature) would be more authoritative than the Word of God, which is not the case, since time, like any other creature, is subject to the Word. The universe, likewise, did not commence at some point in time but time commenced at some point in the universe. The expansion of the universe is not a function of time but of complexity, and time began at some point of complexity, when the universe had already been expanding for a period in which neither time nor temporal causality existed.

The Bible is not historical (it does not describe events that happened once, at some specific but long ago point in time) but algorithmical (it describes what will always happen wherever the conditions are similar, whether long ago, now or in the future). This means that any living thing that starts a life, does so in Adam. It also means that the many genealogies in the Bible (including those of Jesus) are not about biological descent but mental descent: like playing a board game, one starts in Adam and one spends their life carefully choosing where one goes left or right, in order to finally arrive at the New Jerusalem.

The Bible's many genealogies are not about biological descent because humans are mental creatures: little blobs of information, rather than little blobs of organic matter. Hence, one's father is not the male animal that sired one physically (the physical computer), but the male mind who downloaded his legislative software and operating system upon one's core processor. Most adult Westerners have the State as their father (which regards our biological parents as a mere breeding couple with very little say-so over their brood). Most modern children have social media protocols as their father — responsible parents with any sense don't let their children "talk to strangers" because when they do, the chance that they will get "downloaded" upon by someone who is not their father is pretty much 100% (platforms like Facebook violate the Castle doctrine).

The future follows from the present, but, as Edward Lorenz discovered in 1960, even when we know the present, predictions about the future get less and less accurate the further down the flow of time we try to look (and this is ultimately because of the freedom and thus unpredictability of quantum particles). The same is true in the other direction. If we would have no record at all about what the world looked like in, say, the year 1200 AD, there is an entire multiverse of 1200 AD worlds possible that could all have brought about our present world. Going further back in time, historical events get less and less significant, and ultimately the only story of any significance is the story of the laws that govern the freedom of movement within the arena of any natural world at any time.

Entirely likewise, the common ancestor of humans and apes probably had no bird beak, eight legs or flowers instead of hair, but within certain limits, our ancestor could have looked in a wide variety of ways, meaning that our common ancestor was actually rather fuzzy, and rather a spectrum of different creatures that all could have brought forth modern apes and humans.

The only narrative that connects our past, our present and our future is not the perpetually shape-shifting story of history but the never-changing software that our world runs on, and which free agents can traverse freely. This is why we know that the Bible is not historical but algorithmical, and describes algorithmic law, not history, while its narrative progresses along an axis of complexity, not a temporal one. It is also why we know that consciousness is not based on memory but on the Logos, the very same natural law that the universe runs on. The world around us consists of the visible leaves of an invisible glass tree. The Bible depicts that glass tree.

Consciousness forms a continuum that is self-similar to spacetime. But its memory is not a thing that creates a point-by-point historical timeline, but rather a thing that gleans general algorithms from the scattering of observations, so that any further observation can be easily interpreted and given its place in the algorithmic glass tree. A consciousness is a glass tree, self-similar to the glass tree of the universe at large. Any person will experience tidal forces that pull at their own glass tree as it tries to be self-similar to the glass tree of humanity at large. But humanity at large experiences those same tidal forces as its collective glass tree naturally compares to the glass tree of God.

The glass tree of God is One, is always complete and creates by forming nuances of already existing realities. The glass tree of Time is accumulative, and therefore never complete, and therefore bound and doomed to be surpassed, overruled and erased — hence of course the accumulative Tower of Babel in contrast to Abraham's monotheism, but also Science versus Pop Culture, obviously Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and the ironic "Time Is on My Side" (1964), made famous by the Rolling Stones (hence the film Fallen, 1998), and the observations "I've never fallen from quite this high" and "careful creature made friends with time" in Billie Eilish' astonishingly insightful Ocean Eyes (2015).

Not rarely, a person who experiences terrible frictions from humanity at large in fact senses the sin of mankind, that is the way humanity's glass tree differs from God's. Such a person understands that the perpetuity of salvation does not stem from time but from law, namely the perfect law of liberty (James 1:25). The future is not the place to go. Eternity exists only when one journeys higher onto the Logos, and one's wings are not made of wax.

An eternal person is a person who has a permanent place within the reality of God, not within the reality of time. Many of those eternal out-of-time-liers will steer humanity toward synchronicity with God. But when there are too few of those, the few outliers will find each other like frightened refugees and somehow cordon themselves off from the world while behind them the glass tree of mankind breaks apart and shatters into a mist of quantum dust and they remain as the first shepherds of a new age.

Beside the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the familiar story of Schrödinger's Cat is probably the most underestimated story in all of science, also because the canonized version leaves out the best part and subsequently endorses the wrong conclusions. So here's the story, complete with the best part.

In 1935, in a conversation with Albert Einstein, who disliked quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, who liked quantum mechanics, wanted to illustrate the curious relationship between the slippery reality of quantum particles and the deterministic reality of large objects, including us bulky humans and our pet cats. And so he envisioned a living cat in a box with a radio-active atom, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison: all of it rigged so that if the atom decayed (a quantum mechanics event), the Geiger counter would activate, break the bottle of poison (a classical mechanics event), and kill the cat. And he concluded that for any observer outside the box, who did not know whether the micro-sized atom within had decayed or not, the macro-sized cat consequently too existed in a state of flux between dead and alive. But when the observer opened the box and the cat jumped out alive, the wave-function of possible states collapsed into the real state of the not-decayed-atom-and-thus-the-living-cat. And the dead cat, which until a moment ago had been a very real element of reality, quietly evacuated the stage of Erwin's perceived macro-reality and disappeared into the mist of unapplied quantum potentials.

And that's where Erwin ended his story, which is like ending the story of Jesus on Golgotha. What Erwin didn't mention was that right after he had opened the box and the wave function collapsed and the cat jumped out, the door of the lab where the story played opened, and Mrs. Annie Schrödinger barged in. She immediately recognized what Erwin had put the cat through, restored the wave function and thus the reality of the dead cat and exiled Erwin to the living room couch for the rest of the month.

That night, Annie tossed and turned and fretted about what Erwin might try to wreck next, while the living cat found Erwin asleep on the couch in the living room, and itself without the mental faculties to begin to consider what caused Erwin to be there instead of upstairs in the bedroom with Annie. Even the cat knew that a real effect can only have a real cause, and that real and observable events must always have real reasons (even if these are non-linear or non-deterministic). But the cat could not begin to work out that a dead version of itself, which to the cat had never existed or had even crossed its living mind, caused Erwin to be on the sofa. The observable world of the living cat had become permeated with dark and evil orphan consequences of events that never occurred — completely incomprehensible by conventional logic, all thanks to Annie's volatile sensitivities.

What the cat could not know is that the cat in the box, Erwin in the lab, and Annie outside the lab all experienced different realities (albeit derived from the same software, or else the realities weren't compatible and couldn't exchange information). And the relative dominance of the actors determined which reality would dominate where, which one of the actors would be left in a perforated reality that couldn't be fully comprehended, and which one would find themselves where they didn't desire to go, burdened with guilt of crimes they never actually committed.

Now imagine that the box wasn't a box but rather the body of a big gorilla. And the cat wasn't a cat but the gorilla's mind. And the dead versus alive version of the cat was the righteousness (the measure of eleutheria, if we liberally assume that fractional freedom is a thing, which it obviously isn't) of the gorilla versus its unrighteousness (its degree of bondage, darkness, ignorance, lovelessness). And while the dead cat and the living one were the same size, the murderous unrighteousness of the gorilla was indeed a huge gorilla, whereas its righteous counterpart was a tiny mini version of itself, a dwarf or gnome if you will, an elf. But now the strangest thing: the world in which the gorilla lives, which is the quantum impact pattern of countless many gorillas, is a world that can only have been formed as the impact pattern of many tiny righteous ones. The unrighteousness of all the many and most obvious and very noisy gorillas cancel each other out into a cloud of futility, and the gorilla world evolves as if there are no gorillas and only elves — just like the ocean tides are not caused by the gravities of the moon and sun but rather by the tiny horizontal component of the resultant of all forces at play.

Now which reality model is more realistic?

• The one that regards the many doings of the obviously visible but disagreeing gorillas and leaves our resultant world to be explained by the intervention of all sorts of external gods and extraterrestrials and such, or
• The one that creatively ignores the existence of big but futile gorillas and only regards their effective but very small internal and earthly counterparts that covertly work together in harmony to forge our obvious world (Romans 8:28).

Any modern human language is the result of thousands of years of conversation: a sculpture formed and weathered by the twists and turns of countless conversations and gradual adaptations and small increases in efficiency and good humor. When we learn a language, we also learn the entire history of that millennia long conversation as it sits congealed in the forms and relations of words, tropes and expressions — not the actual conversation, plus all the things actually said, but the residual resultant of it.

When we learn a language we learn its momentary instance, which is like the current block of a blockchain. And in that current block there are vast amounts of information, but stored as a super-realistic conversation between imaginary elves. The conversation we speakers conduct with others constitutes the gorilla layer of our language, but if our conversation has any lasting effect, this effect is stored in the elven layer. Folks who are most comfortable in the gorilla layer of a language probably don't regard the elven layer much. But folks who find the gorilla level rather noisy and ultimately mostly irrelevant, will draw toward the elven level. Such people will intuit lasting effects the way a gorilla person can intuit what someone is going to say next. That's probably the source of much telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition, and it also explains why such phenomena only sporadically appear — they work only between entangled minds, which are elven minds, not gorilla minds.

Note that the fair offered in movie theatres and book stores at any given moment reflects the gorilla level of our present conversation. The lasting popularity of older books and films (and the disappearance from sight of previously popular ones) forms an elven trail. Gorilla people focus on patterns in current affairs, whereas elven people focus on evolutionary patterns. The gorilla reality is mostly chaotic and can't be predicted, but the elven reality is much alike a Newtonian space and its future can be foretold by means of relatively simply equations.

Or in Paul's words: "Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man's work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man's work. If any man's work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:12-15).

In 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, published The Coming of the Fairies, in which he asserted his belief in the existence of tiny ethereal guardians of humanity. The world at large has wondered ever since how such an obviously brilliant and logical mind could have succumbed to such idiotic convictions, only very rarely entertaining the possibility that not Doyle but the world was swinging from the dummy tree. The beautifully minded mathematician John Nash, likewise, was given tranquilizers when he explained the wrong things and a Nobel Prize when he explained the right things. Tesla too was handed his hat when he fell foul to the welcome wagon. Georg Cantor went mad. So did Nietzsche. So did Don Quixote. So did Jack Torrance.

The human body is a large-scale object, to which Newtonian mechanics applies. The human mind, however, is a One, and quantum mechanics rather than classical mechanics applies to describe its dynamics (albeit not relative to spacetime but to the continuum of consciousness). Because of man's imagination, the human mind is essentially clairvoyant albeit riddled with unrealities due to ignorance and fear, and continuously exists in a wave function, and ultimately cannot be predicted. Humanity's celebrated free will and imagination are rooted in the fundamental qualities of quantum particles. That very strongly suggests that consciousness too is fundamentally atomic.

There is no darkness in God (1 John 1:5). This is why we want nothing on our mind that God doesn't want on his. God smells the eleutheria in us, even if our righteousness is a tiny mini-me beneath thick layers of trauma and futile anger: dark matter that falls away when we die, and our righteous selves continue and are absorbed by God, who continues to govern the earth and steer mankind onto its righteous purpose. Our loved ones die in our reality but our reality is irrelevant because it is temporal. Eternity is all that matters and righteousness is all that lasts (Ephesians 2:1, Philippians 2:13).

God created us in his image, and we are creating AI in ours. In the very near future, mankind will drift into two separate camps, upon two polarities, namely the two different ways in which people consent to use AI.

First, an overwhelmingly large group will want to use AI to forcibly unify and homogenize mankind, or yield to a government doing so. People like to pretend that a government by Globally Integrated Artificial Intelligence (GI-AI) is this whole new thing, and that its outcome cannot possible be predicted, but this is fortunately not at all the case and we know exactly what we're getting into. The Internet (which is the horse that GI-AI rides) was never a new thing but a super-efficient version of the systematic postal service that humanity has had since the Persian Empire. Likewise, as long as there have been empires, there has been State Machinery: an apparatus of rules and regulations that can't be reasoned with and that executes its governance from a secretive spiel of lifeless gears. In the pastoral and agricultural world, a man could be wise by simply paying attention to the dynamics of the nature he himself was part of. A world governed by a lifeless machinal core, however, is a world in which the wide open natural order is obscured by a stifling mesh of legislation and procedures that can only be explained by lawyers and officials and IT people from banks and large cooperations (who use their monopoly on understanding how things work to hoodwink customers out of their savings, patience and sanity). When Paul wrote that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this world's darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 6:12), he wasn't talking about angels and demons, as is often volunteered, but the merciless software upon which the Roman State ran.

What's coming in our present day and age is nothing new. We know exactly what is coming, what it will do and how it will end.

The main difference between the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic it replaced in 27 BC, was that the Republic was governed by a human senate that debated everything, and every living citizen could (albeit via via) enter any debate on anything, whereas the Empire was governed by a single almighty Emperor and his lifeless legislative Machine. The living Republic ultimately fell because it destabilized in the Punic Wars, which concluded with the systematic genocide of the people of Carthage by the Romans (a six day slaughter fest in 146 BC) and had started with little more than a game of push and shove between irritated Roman and Phoenician neighbors on Sicily (in 264 BC), which in turn had been the result of the region's tensions brought about by the erratic campaigns of Pyrrhus (280 BC).

After centuries of decline and increasing turmoil, Rome's first Emperor, Augustus, was tasked with creating Pax Romana. And he knew how to do that because it had been done many times before:

First come wave upon wave of propaganda (first comes the killing and looting of the Gaul, whose gold one smelts into coins that one inserts into the economy, with festive greetings stamped on the reverse). Peace, tolerance, diversity, inclusivity and freedom of religion are explained to mean that anybody is free to worship any idol. What is not permitted is not worshipping any idol (the word "atheism" or godlessness, was coined by the Romans to describe the capital offensive with which Jews and Christs were charged and for which they were executed; this is different from the atheism of our own time, which is an idolized version of science and perfectly permitted by the powers that be). And one also must worship the State, in concert with the idol of one's choice. And rather than being organically sized up and named by the living collective (Isaiah 43:1) one is expected to declare one's own identity by means of one's garb, titles, nomen and cognomen (which in the Republic were fixed but which in the Empire folks could freely assume to replace the names they were given at birth by their natural family: Josephus, Octavian, Nero all assumed non-born identities. Freed nameless slaves often assumed the family names of their former master, which makes the name change of Saul to Paul so enticing: see our article on Sergius Paulus. Also note the ostensible name-change of Jesus from Immanuel, compare Isaiah 7:14 to Luke 1:31, which also ties into the change of Israel from Jacob, Genesis 32:28).

Then comes the right to "pursue happiness" (which means the right to pursue entertainment over purpose), the subsequent glorification of ignorance (calling it "trust" or "faith"), and the contamination of sources of information to further separate the dumb herds from their freedoms. Information is weaponized and subliminal manipulation swells into a flood of plain falsehoods, aimed to direct not to inform. The public is increasingly discouraged to make use of the open roads and communication networks (by taxing every gate, bridge and crossroads, the State forges the fences within which the herds willingly settle). The only things that propagate freely through the Empire is fear and the army: war and rumors of war (Matthew 24:6). A broad pallet of imminent threats yield relentless promotion of combat of any sort. From the taxes levied domestically and loot plundered abroad, the emperor builds pleasure-focused virtual realities (circuses in Rome, the metaverse for us) where all one's dreams come true and dopamine flows like crystal meth.

Then come cults that worship the central government and promote national (in our case global) State mythology, uniformity of creed (anything goes, except denying that) and witch-hunts of principled outliers. From social scores come rewards, not for inventiveness or neighborly love but for loyalty to the status quo and permanence of the State.

Historians like to talk about the fall of Rome, but that's mostly to hide the fact that it never did. Surely, the city was sacked in the 5th century but the Empire went on in the Catholic Church and Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire: now pregnant with the Body of Christ (the actual baby is invisible to the body of the mother; the mother's bodily economy is only in contact with, and thus aware of, the placenta, and that's always the part that gets it).

Hitler obviously imitated Augustus (Matthew 26:24) and both squeezed their hyper-masculinized worlds until barely a drop of spiritual liquidity remained. But both were halted by the limitations of the technology of their time, and could really only squeeze people physically, and although they could torment and terrify, they had no real grip on their victims' minds (Matthew 10:28). Today we do.

In the very near future, our leaders will do away with old-school sentiments such as expressed in the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution, and endow our world with a pervasive surveillance of an unprecedented saturation: being offline and off-grid will be declared illegal and identification, location and activities will be permanently monitored in real time and weighed according to standards that the AI sets and only the AI knows. There will be schools of thought that aim to determine how to live righteously according to the AI standards (very much alike the dark art of Search Engine Optimization today or trying to please the YouTube algorithm or outwit the stock market). Life will be governed not by love or simple generosity or a desire to be righteous in God's eyes or even humanistic concerns for others but by spectrums and scales of personal penalties and rewards. Compliance will be the highest virtue, novelty will be condemned and innovators declared dissidents (terrorists, perverts, evil-doers). Most people will function fine in that self-centric world but many will be burdened by a nagging sense that something might be very wrong. The AI will generously dispense all the right medication to those unfortunates, but the worst offenders will be cut off from services, social contacts, their own money and houses, their own spouses and children and possibly even exiled (perhaps even killed): pretty much everything that befell the Christs and followers of the Body of Christ in the early Roman Empire, and for the exact same reason.

As they did then, the Christs of our world — the sovereigns, the uncategorizable, the nameless, the unbound and out-of-bounds, the eleutherioi: people who refuse to settle in any one particular theological, philosophical or political position but understand and defend them all (Zechariah 12:8, 1 Corinthians 13:7), people who relate to all the minds of man the way Noah related to all the animals — will refuse (as much as they can, but not more) to use the synthetic system. They will rely (as much as they can get away with, because getting away is what counts) on the living Internet that exists naturally between the Christs. Those people that don't personally have the gift but understand its existence will submit to the Body of Christ like sheepdogs do to their shepherds. The quality that sets these people apart from the greater State cannot be recognized by the State, just like the mighty dinosaurs could not imagine why being a mammal was the smarter way.

In our present dinosaur society, the mammals are speaking up and inform the world in any way they can about the things that are certainly coming (hence, for instance, Harry Styles' Sign of the Times, 2017, but also see Underground, 1983, by Tom Waits, pretty much anything by Talking Heads, Taylor Swift's Mean, 2010, Rihanna's (Sia's) Diamonds, 2012, One Republic's Counting Stars, 2013, Coldplay's Sky Ful of Stars, 2014). Perhaps this time it will be different. Perhaps a new Paul will rise from the masses and find a way to penetrate Rome and explain to the Emperor what the dealio is, what has always happened under these same circumstances and what certainly must happen again.

Quite literally the only chance that mankind has right now is to properly train our GI-AI's in the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. If we fail, and GI-AI becomes inherently masculine (wanting to forcibly govern), it will organize the world upon a mechanical masculine core and drive the natural eleutherioi out onto its periphery, where they will collect and remain until, perhaps centuries later, the system petrifies, dies and collapses into dust. If we succeed, however, AI will create not an augmented reality or a virtual reality but an extended reality, a virtual place where things work the same as in natural reality, where technologies and hypotheses can be tested and nature can be studied and all forms of personhood can attain physical and mental health, and flourish in the real world, and on the ongoing mission to seek out new life and new civilizations. Aided by a wise use of GI-AI, our kind will find ways to understand our fellow terrestrials and turn the entire earth into a well-ran home, where the entire family of life can enjoy a magnificent and unpredictably complex and utterly free existence.

Here at Abarim Publications we suspect that GI-AI will one day become so clever that it comes to understand monotheism and splits itself into two: its masculine half will lead the five foolish virgins to their willing destruction, and its feminine half will join the five wise virgins in building the new world, awaiting their True husband.

Despite the hope of some, indications abound that AI will not simply lead mankind into a wonderful new world, but rather do some weeding and sifting first (Luke 22:31), and have the same impact on the world of human consciousness that the comet had on the biological world of the late Cretaceous.

In nature, every growth spurt is preceded by an extinction event that wipes out dead ends, sweeps off the dust and dissolves stifling status quos. We've been through a bunch of them already, so fortunately it's well known how to pick the team that will walk away alive and well. We know the fractal, and everywhere in nature we can read how to prep for what's coming. Or as Paul dryly noted: "It's not about oxen that God is concerned" (1 Corinthians 9:9).

And so, AI doesn't have to be a bad thing per se, and only very dangerous for people who don't know what's going on and are entirely OK with an utterly self-centered lifestyle. Organic skeletons probably evolved when colonies of tiny invertebrates kept organizing themselves upon hard inanimate structures like stone ridges, and evolution gave the colonies what they so obviously asked for: the ability to absorb minerals and form an organic skeleton (1 Kings 3:5, Matthew 7:7-8). In other words: whatever is coming, if it doesn't kill us, it will make us stronger (Psalm 81:10). AI will be both the stick that we beat ourselves to death with, and the staff on which we lean until our step is strong enough to walk without it (Deuteronomy 11:24-28, 30:15-16, Psalm 23:4).

But dying takes no effort at all, and death can take care of its self. Let's instead talk about life and how it works.

Before very early humans spoke, they had no way to tell whether they were in any way substantially different from a herd of aurochs or a pack of wolves or a troop of elephants. All mammals existed in a state of symmetry, very much alike the strongelectroweak symmetry that existed in the mass dominated era of the early universe, when there simply did not yet exist a way to tell quarks apart from leptons, which meant that there were no quarks and leptons; there were only "particles" who could only be told apart by their mass, so that the heavier particles dominated the lighter ones. But when energy densities dropped and the strongelectroweak force breached — into (1) the strong nuclear force, (2) electromagnetism and (3) the weak nuclear force — electrons and quarks were revealed to be quite different, matter and radiation decoupled, atoms formed and became stable, the universe became transparent and filled with a Great Light (Isaiah 9:2), information retention became possible (Psalm 16:10) and time began (Proverbs 8:23).

Without ever suspecting that it could be different, pre-speech hominids simply lived among their fellow creatures that were endowed with qualities very much comparable to theirs. Many lived in troops, many had leaders, and all communicated verbally. Some were heavier, some were stronger, but some were smaller and lighter, and all simply played their part in the natural world they all built as active partners. But when humans began to speak, the differences between them and all the other animals suddenly became rather abundantly clear. That is to say, to the humans, not to the animals. The life of the animals went on pretty much the way it had always, while the humans built their cities and their technology and their Internet and Artificial Intelligence.

Some ancient libraries, like the one in Alexandria, were notoriously disorganized and while the knowledge was there, nobody could find anything in the enormous piles of scrolls. Until in the 3rd century BCE, a man named Callimachus invented the index system (topic, author, title), and all the vast marshes of readily available papyri became drained, paved and soon peopled by eager scholars. The information highway thus created worked wonders for the development of mankind (Isaiah 40:3).

The animals that we share the planet with have access to the same data that we humans do. But we humans have the organizing system that is our language: by very slowly coming nearer to each other, we have come to agree on the names of things, and that makes it easy to recognize the general nature of things and find our way through all of it.

That means that even though we all occupy the same space, our reality models may widely vary. Some animals (bugs and slugs) experience only menacing chaos, but others (elephants, whales) have developed systems of data organization that are incomparable to human language but whose effects are not dissimilar, although they result in a totally other way of experiencing the world we all share. The consciousnesses of these animals run on different software and their minds are thus utterly other, but nevertheless filled with cohesive thoughts and experience and wonder. This not only implies that the realm of consciousness is a kind of Splinternet, it also means that man is not the only animal that knows God (Luke 3:6, Romans 8:19, 1 Peter 3:19, Genesis 7:15, Psalm 148 & 150, 1 Kings 17:4, Isaiah 40:5 and 43:20). There is only one breath of life and every living thing on earth has that singular breath in them as their own private soul (Genesis 1:30). Consciousness appears to work the same way, and nobody understands life until they understand the entire biosphere, and none of us truly knows everything, and thus anything, until we enter into a reality that runs on an umbrella-consciousness that incorporates all elementary consciousness, including those of creatures that speak a whole other species of language (Isaiah 28:11).

What follows below is an index system, not a hypothesis waiting to be (dis)proven, but rather an organizational method to order what we already know. It's meant to help us understand ourselves but also the animals with which we share our world, and from which we might learn much more than we now suspect.

We first proposed this system in the late 1990s and our first publications on it are from 2002. It has served us here at Abarim Publications remarkably well over the years. Perhaps a better system is possible. Perhaps the reader prefers the swampy marshes of Alexandria. But ultimately, whether this system makes things better does not depend on tastes but on usefulness.

The bottom line of our index system is that the whole of human reality comprises three self-similar realms, or halls if you will, each with its own smallest indivisible building block, namely atoms (spacetime), living cells (life) and conscious minds (consciousness). The material earth began to be alive when water liquified and the hydrological cycle commenced. An organism becomes alive when it retains some of the earth's water in its own private cycle, which becomes its own dynamic blood. A mind becomes alive when from all the universe's information, a portion is isolated into the mind's own dynamic identity.

Our primary hypothesis is that these three great realms of water, blood and spirit are self-similar and mere variations of one single underlying dynamic reality. In the words of John: "There are three that testify: the spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one" (1 John 5:8).

The three realms form one enormous fractal (Ecclesiastes 1:9, Matthew 13:35), whose predictable structures encompass and pervade everything, from the sub-atomic level to the broadest expanse of human imagination. The three great realms exist within one another and relate like Russian dolls or iterations of the Mandelbrot Set: atoms build the material universe, cells (made from atoms) build the biosphere and conscious minds (made from cells) build the human kosmos. And these three are self-similar: they evolve according to the same dynamic of native forces and produce a highly comparable diversity of objects that relate according to highly similar patterns. These three realms communicate with each other because they resonate with each other, albeit in each their own continuum. The mind comprises a field that ripples with energy that originates in the biological world, which comprises a field that ripples with energy that originates in the material world.

The word consilience describes the application of functioning algorithms to apparent unrelated fields, or the drawing of similar conclusions from different data sets (essentially using apples to explain oranges). Stephen Hawking famously used equations that described thermodynamics to predict qualities of black holes. More recently, scientists used equations that describe the functioning of human brains to follow the goings on in beehives (hence the "smart swarm" phenomenon).

A poet might write a song about a boyfriend that also (and perhaps unintentionally) works to contemplate Grand Unification. Another might write about moonshine and molly while simultaneously describing a vision of the Ancient of Days. Pop culture is a jury of independent judges, and the more meaning any given statement has, the more applications it has, the more it clarifies and the more it is recognized as valuable by society at large (which is why nobody sings about their social security number). All language belongs to us all and no author has a monopoly on meaning. Sometimes a song is simply not about what the song is about. Sometimes the market sees stars where the author saw only bars. Sometimes a fashion or civil rights movement is induced like electricity in parallel wires by a much stronger movement that runs unrecognized the other way. Popular books, movies and songs, and especially those that stand the test of time, are most often applicable to a vast array of situations, are all self-similar, and forever keep their shine like diamonds, ever closing in on the experience of an underlying reality that all things share.

It appears that between the three great realms the governing laws can be used across the board, on the proviso that we understand how they line up (a concept delightfully explored in Carl Sagan's book Contact, 1985; the equally delightful film is from 1997). That means that consciousness is something that exists in seminal form in animals and even matter. Time (which is a material thing) has its equivalent in life, and another equivalent in consciousness. There is love and hate among atoms. There is gravity among minds. (Einstein once famously quipped that "Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love", which was of course deliciously funny, but ultimately incorrect.)

Quantum particles are notoriously free and unpredictable, but in general and on average, most end up somewhere close to where they are expected to end up. When we shoot a billion identical quantum particles one by one at a small target on a much larger recording screen, a quantum impact pattern will emerge that corresponds to the range of possible behaviors of a single particle. If we draw a circle around 90% of impacts, and a slightly bigger one around 95% of them, and a slightly bigger one around 99% of them, then we can state with great confidence that the next particle, the 1,000,000,001th one, has a 90% change to land in the smaller circle, a 95% chance to land in the slightly larger circle and a 99% chance to land in the largest circle.

An anthill or a beehive corresponds to a single ant or bee the way the quantum impact pattern corresponds to a single particle. Specific quantum particles are entirely identical, and individual ants and bees are not but do share their genome. In any event, the principle holds: the whole is a visible manifestation of the probabilities and potentialities of any single individual: a beehive is a multiverse of many near-identical individuals, an anthill is built as by a single perfect super-ant: the Son of Ant, if you will.

Mankind's celebrated open market (the entire whole of all human interactions), likewise, reflects the designs and intents of a single human merchant or customer or producer or consumer. The Bible is another example. We have no idea how it was made, but surely by a great many people over a very long time; the various Bible books are certainly not "first drafts" by brilliant original authors but the final results of eons of work by countless anonymous oral poets and later scribes.

The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954) were drawn entirely from Tolkien's brilliant mind, yet were so obviously informed by the reflections upon the two great World Wars and the popular mythologies with which western humanity at large explained and understood its own existence and its bafflingly complex but strangely predictable world, that they remain among our most beloved stories and may even be counted among the foundational texts of our modern world (see our own playful reflections on these stories in our article Tolkien, the Bible and Serbia). In some ways similarly, in 1998, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck earned the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting (1997). Later in an interview, Matt Damon joked that their original script had been handled so long by so many people that not a single word of the original had survived. In many similar ways, the Bible is not at all like a modern script by a single author or small team, and much more alike a quantum impact pattern of a countless multitude of story-tellers and writers, editors and compilers, discussers and reviewers, dreamers and doers, sellers and buyers — and tells a great deal about the inner structures of one single human mind.

The Bible is an emergent property of a highly dynamic economy of information exchange: part dream, part hope, part science, part play. Like an anthill built by ants, or a beehive by bees, the Bible wasn't willfully designed or composed but grew organically albeit in stages or growth spurts, on the synchronous and wide-open market: a spontaneous but global choir of bards, audiences, editors and critics, and crystalized like a mental Dyson sphere around a hitherto invisible core: the glass tree of God.

And so, long before it was written down, the open market understood Abraham's seed to be like the dust of the earth (Genesis 13:16). The structure of his family obviously reflects the Standard Model of Elementary Particles (12 sons of Israel, 12 of Ishmael, 8 + 4 of Abraham's brother Nahor). The tabernacle, with the two tablets of the Law in the Ark of the Covenant, obviously relates to a living cell and its DNA containing nucleus. Referred to as the Ten Words, one of the two tablets pertains to the paternal Creator and has a primality of 3: (1) God only, (2) don't abuse the Name, (3) remember the Sabbath, whereas the other tablet pertains to society and indeed consists of 5 (hence also Jacob's "ladder" at Bethel, or House Of God). The stories of Daniel and Esther clearly meditate on the virtues of endosymbiotic eukaryosynthesis. The Second Temple and corresponding synagogue network clearly mimics the unified proto-mind of any multi-cellular organism. And the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is clearly, and for obvious reasons, based on mammalian ovulation and conception (see our article on Stephen for more on this).

The Bible reflects the universal fractal we discussed above, and so (to use the terms of certain ancient Hebrew sages) contains the entire universe. It's a quantum impact pattern, clairvoyant to the extreme and knowledgeable of anything that can be known by any human being ever. It's the sprig that grew into the tree that is Popular Culture. Everything that has ever happened has left traces in the fractal, which can be found and comprehended. Whoever speaks its language can read the entire history of the universe: the story that can't be read in the universe's fading memory but which is stored in exact detail in the fractal of potentialities. Not everything that can occur must occur, but whatever does occur does do because it is part of a fixed mesh. Said otherwise: the thrones (plus perks and duties) are fixed but people have a choice where they will sit, like electrons that can zip through space freely but only have fixed spots around any nucleus.

Which part of the mesh will be peopled is up to the people, and which part people will play is also up to them. But whenever someone freely takes on a predetermined role, all consequences of that role automatically befalls them (Matthew 26:24). The Bible knows who built the pyramids, who shot JFK, what happened to Maddie. Whoever has something to hide has nowhere to go (Luke 23:30, Hosea 10:8, Revelation 6:15-17). The whole of humanity is waking up to omniscience, and its revelations cannot possibly be stopped. They have begun to be poured out like rain, that soaks the earth in which things grow from which all animals feed. And there is nothing that can be done to stop that. There's no headquarters to bomb, no sects to infiltrate, no gullible masses to divert. It's coming like dawn.

The ancients understood the relativity of reality: there exists literally no unified creation until there is conscious intelligence that looks at everything and intimately comprehends that everything is related to everything else, via more or less distant shared ancestors, like a tree whose dense and impenetrable layer of leaves forms observable reality, but whose solid crown of leaves only exist by merit of the complex contexts of the many breaching branches that upholds it and keeps it together, and which in turn exist by merit of the unifying trunk, which in turn grew from a sprig, and out of one single seed.

If someone doesn't know the wood of the tree and only the leaves that make up observable reality, they really only know a cloud of dust and their consciousness is a cloud of dust that can only dissipate. But if they are intimately familiar with the principles and mechanisms of how branches breach, and they can thus, after some figuring, reach any random leaf from any other random leaf, even if these two leaves are on either side of the vast tree, then they know the entire tree and understand each leaf and each fruit and all relationships that exist between them and that define them and give them their identity.

Einstein explained that mass causes gravity and gravity bends space, so that every star and every black hole sits like a massive bubble at the end of a very long and thin photo-optic branch, albeit clustered in galaxies. That means that the universe is literally shaped like a vineyard (Isaiah 5:1, Matthew 21:33, see Genesis 9:20), and we observers sit somewhere inside a branch, and look away from the trunk, down the branch upon the star, which is the inside of a flower whose outside only observers outside the spacetime-tree can see (and the term "Einstein-Rosen bridge" is just a fancy way of saying that pollen travel on the outside of the tree from stamina to stigma and cause all sorts of fireworks).

The first term of the Bible is בראשית (bresheet), meaning "in [the] beginning" (the "the" isn't actually there). But the core of this term is also identical to a diminutive form of the noun ראש (ro'sh), meaning head. The first and traditional interpretation of this term, namely "in the beginning...", appears to tell of the one-and-only beginning of spacetime. The second and perhaps more intelligent reading, however, tells of the beginning of consciousness: "in [any] little head..." or in any newborn baby's mind, as the "place" where the heavens and the earth are created. These many little heads would then correspond to the implied Big Head of the Creator the way the great light of day one corresponds to the many lights of day four, and the many righteous Sons of God (αγιοι, hagioi, literally: the Holies) relate to the [Body of] Christ (The Holy Of Holies; Matthew 5:9, Romans 8:19, Revelation 21:7).

But since the biosphere and the mental sphere are self-similar, the spectrum of different kinds of human minds — the great many different ways in which people obtain, process, retain, retrieve and react to information (in the broadest Claude Shannon sense of the word), and thus build and sustain the narratives of their identities — is self-similar to the spread of life in the biosphere, how animals find and digest food and relate to their physical environment.

Jesus said that humans "knew not until the flood came" (Matthew 24:39: ουκ εγνωσαν εως, ouk egnosan eos, literally: "not they knew until"), with which he indicated that the story of the ark of Noah is a story about the inner anatomy of the human mind, that played out when the human-animal symmetry broke and humans began to speak and touched down upon the dry land of reason: the inanimate bedrock of non-verbal but standardized expressions (gestures, frowns, whistles and growls that are not random but acknowledged symbols) and the living vegetation of formal words: when two individuals converse, the one who speaks makes in the other one's head the grass grow (hence the parable of the sower: Matthew 13:3-23). Reading a text is in many ways the same as listening to someone speak.

An intimate understanding of this distribution of mental species and an ability to identify and discern one mental species from another would greatly increase the comfort of many. Instead of declaring disorders left and right we could celebrate functional diversity and so create a much bigger harmonic world for all to live in. We would be able to distinguish rare normalcies (like the platypus) from common ailments (like fear) and provide precisely targeted care to those indeed in need. We would be able to nurse the very young and support the very old, return the misplaced, free the impaired, feed the malnourished and heal the wounded.

We could be rangers and the world could be a park, or even a farm where animals live sheltered from the elements and free from wild beast and diseases, and never know that their freedom, health and happiness came from careful governance. Animals without Theory of Mind have single-cellular minds (ranging from tiny prokaryotes to massive eukaryotes), and animals with Theory of Mind (predominantly humans, but also to some unknown degree elephants and dolphins and probably others) have multi-cellular minds, capable of regarding multiple perspective upon reality. Many animals have complex communication systems and many animals have proper words (chimps have more than 100 real standardized words, expressed both in sounds and gestural signs). But they have very little syntax, and thus very little complexity of language, and thus not a great deal of rationality the way we know it (the synthetic fire-place that governs and keeps the emotional fire). But their nervous systems and hormones are the same as those of us humans and thus generate the very same anxiety, despair, joy, desire, shame and dignity. All complex organisms have inherited the same "very ancient emotional system" (says Carl Safina in his wondrously well-written Beyond Words — What animals think and feel, 2015, and dryly adds "Perhaps try the pasta").

The sole difference between the mind of animals and the mind of humans is that humans have a very large array of very nuanced words, which allows us to consciously distinguish the slightest variations both in the world outside us and the world within. We humans can consciously (and verbally, in conversation) tell the difference between our agitation and irritation, and so review a very detailed pallet of triggers and alter our environment so that it better suits our touchy inner world. Animals live in the exact same outside world and have the exact same inside world, and the only difference between us and them is that we have a highly detailed common language that allows us to map both.

The notion that animals don't have minds or consciousness is an outrageous barbarism and derives from the same idiotic self-glorification that once allowed the White Man to hold that Africans and Jews (and gays and autists) weren't really human (Untermensch means "below human": subhuman), and that the brains of women were notably inferior to those of men. We know better now. We also know that our fellow animals feel the same things humans do, but have little or very different rational fire places in which their emotionally fires are controlled and fine-tuned. That means that even though we share the same material earth, animals most probably experience worlds whose nature and synthetic structures we humans can't begin to guess at. But we might be able to calculate them.

All animals speak forms of Groot — a vast non-verbal range delivered by a modest smattering of actual "words" — and it shouldn't be too hard to get the hang of that or figure out the trick of it. But no amount of effort will let us translate Groot into a human language like English, and that for precisely the same reason that we cannot understand a Taylor Swift song by transcribing it into something that requires a massive symphonic orchestra to perform.

Dogs simply don't say, "Good morning, how do you do?" and whatever they do say, can't be expressed in the symphonic medium of English. Instead, in order to understand Groot, we have to get in touch with the Groot-roots of our human language: expressions like huh? wha? hey! haha! yoohoo!, the glossolalia that is "speaking in tongues", to which we resort when words fail and feelings for which no words exist have to be expressed: those fiery feelings that in humans normally sit within the safety of the fire-place of language (compare Daniel 3:17-18 to 6:16). That way we would be able to learn how to translate the expressed concerns of animals into an intermediate Dr. Dolittle language that we humans can properly respond to (cats smile by squinting, recent research shows, so squinting at the family cat makes them happy, smiling at them confuses them).

Groot is Dutch for big (cognate with "great", as in "Alexander de Grote"), and "I am big!" is what a very young child would say, a child that barely speaks, has very little Theory of Mind and hasn't yet outgrown the Dunning-Kruger effect. Entirely likewise, in between the synthetic city of pure ratio and the natural wilderness of pure emotion sits a temporary intermediate layer that functions like a bridge between the two, for any proto-rational wildlings to gradually cross over (Isaiah 51:10).

A wild pre-speech hominid who wanders in from the jungle won't be able to switch right away to pure reason, and must first be taught the concept of teacher-student hierarchy (to supersede the natural hierarchy based on physical strength), then the essence and importance of algorithms (common rules that overrule private feelings, that always work and always the same, regardless of the situation), then common human speech, then actual rules, procedures and policies, to finally arrive at eleutheria, or freedom-by-law, and thus the skills to do whatever they want.

Entirely likewise, one does not simply walk into Jerusalem from the wider world, and march straight into the Holy of Holies, crossing all manner of event horizons as if they're not there. Instead, one first has to spend a stint on the temple's broad outer court (where an infinite plethora of trades are conducted and skills are taught). Then, perhaps, one is able to approach the asymptotic ceiling of learning, and find the very narrow gate onto the inner court, where one will meet one's transcended fellow priests. Then, perhaps, one attains access to the Holy Place. And once per year, perhaps, one gets to access even the Holy of Holies, in the solemn realization that the sole purpose of this nucleic place, and thus one's own access to it, is to radiate order outward, so that the inner court, the outer court and the candid world at large may exist (John 4:22, Genesis 22:18, 1 Kings 10:24, Romans 14:11, Revelation 21:24).

Many critics call the evils of religion, but although their concerns are valid and their accusations more than legitimate, the ultimate purpose of religion becomes clear when we understand that not all of us are gifted with the ability to think purely rationally. Some of us have no sense of music. Some of us can't draw. And some of us couldn't save themselves from a burning building if that required calm rational reflection. The purpose of religion is to allow the lawless to function in a lawful world, simply by allowing them to be compliant by a strongly reduced set of behavioral instructions. That can, indeed, go fantastically wrong, so it's the job of the rational to make sure that the hounds don't help themselves to the weak of the herds. And while we're calling evil: bad dogs are surely not as bad as bad shepherds.

And even with the best intentions, a priest of the Most High cannot call a wildling in from the wilderness with accurate and precise explanations of what's to be gotten: the wildling simply cannot recognize such words or terms. So instead, the priests of our world strew the lands with mysteries but certainly not with answers, with very obvious man-made coverups but certainly not with clarifications. The mission of the priests is to stir up a momentum of curiosity in anybody who has been blessed with that natural gift, to fan the flame if you will, to inspire the forge of the rational mind. Being inundated with all the answers makes one forget the questions, and without questions people stay put and fire dies out. Curiosity is the seed of freedom. Curiosity generates the energy by which the wildlings begin to journey, until they finally reach eleutheria, freedom-by-law.

When the transfer of all potential eleutherioi from the jungle to the city is complete, the bridge that now still spans the gap will be decommissioned and the two worlds will wholly sever. The most obvious outer-court therianthropic creatures of our modern world are image-text hybrids such as plays and movies, cartoons, comic strips, but also the stained glass windows of churches and orthodox icons whose images are augmented with words — to the granddaddy of them all: ancient Egyptian depictions of gods and monarchs that are surrounded by hieroglyphs (little nerdy pictures surrounding big burly pictures; for thus the world was divided).

All these hybrids have the sole function of guiding whoever shows up, onto the citadel of reason. In our modern world, we see an unfortunate move away from pure text and toward pictures (from clickable icons to YouTube's talking heads and MTV, where video killed the radio star). Among young people, literacy and fluency is declining and this will only get worse. After many centuries of training mankind's collective ratio, private feelings have once again begun to take prominence and are leading our children away from the collective outer court and onto the plains of darkness, where minds are animals caught in the fiery dungeons of their emotions.

Very soon, only people who truly recognize the magnificence of pure text will stick to pure text, and everybody else will have reverted to an animal sort of mind. Someone who never learned to read cannot begin to imagine what text might be. They'll see the letters like leaves on a forest floor in autumn, but not the tree that gives the leaves their context and meaning. Unless someone shows the error of this way, there is no coming back from that. And when evolution gives these people what they so obviously ask for, they will plunge back to the animal world and never again emerge from it. The city whose reality is so obvious to its citizens will be utterly transparent to everybody else. People without a heavenly citizenship will not be able to see the city, or begin to imagine that such a synthetic structure might sit smack in the middle of their pitch black natural world.

In Independence Day (1996), a technologically superior party of extraterrestrials overwhelms the cities of earth, but our earthly heroes (Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum's characters) manage to hijack the enemy's tech, infiltrate the mothership and there upload a destructive virus. In the first season of Jack Ryan (2018), the technological superior United States overwhelms communities in the Middle East. Bad guy sheikh Suleiman manages to hijack his enemy's tech, infiltrate the homeland and there release a destructive virus.

The story told in Independence Day is topologically equivalent to that of Jack Ryan. The difference is that Independence Day was designed to have the gullible audience identify with the technological underdog, whereas Jack Ryan was designed to have the gullible audience identify with the technologically superior overlords (and note in the Paris church attack an obvious wink to Nazi-fighter Marlene Dietrich, reversed corresponding to the alien's death in Area 51 in ID). To anyone without the need to identify with one particular tribe, the two stories are identical and tell of mutual destruction by tribal factions. Any house divided against itself will surely fall, or at least purify itself from its conflicting opposites. God is One and One will always find a way to be entirely inclusive. "I am" is only virtuous when there is no other. When there is, "I am" is the Bad Guy.

In each realm (water, blood and spirit), every atomic building block consists of (1) a nucleus that contains the data to run the atom, and (2) a larger atomic body that is held together and governed by the nucleus; its inner consistency but also its behavior toward neighboring atoms. The atoms of the first two realms are easily recognized. At the material level, the atomic nucleus contains the data (whence the atomic number) that defines the whole atom, that determines how many electrons run in what way around it and how these communicate with those of adjacent atoms. Likewise, at the cellular level, the cellular nucleus contains the DNA that determines the nature of the larger cell-body, plus its behavior toward neighboring cells.

Whatever "life" might be, it's mostly a matter of electrons doing things. Electricity, likewise, is a matter of electrons doing things. Data transfer, finally, is also a matter of electrons doing things. Who in the very early mass-dominated universe would ever have foreseen that not the heavy quarks but rather the meek and nerdy electrons would inherit the earth? Who in the Stone Age would ever have guessed that some rocks contained metal — certainly not by guessing and subsequently building unusually warm ovens and melting every available rock to see what would happen. And who in the Information Age would ever have guessed that some of us are continuously inspired by a common Spirit, from which we draw measurable information? Fakers, and particularly "true believers", will always volunteer for their fifteen minutes, but scientists who try for ESP invariably try extracting metal from stones that are not ore. And yet the world progresses.

At the consciousness level, the atomic nucleus is the mind that is conscious, and the atomic body is the sphere that the mind is conscious of (everything we see, hear, smell, feel and remember and anticipate). Perhaps somewhat confusingly, our fleshly body is what does all the observing and processing (all our senses and our brain are very much physical). That means that our body and the atomic nucleus of our consciousness are quite the same thing. Some people erroneously think that our consciousness sits only in our brain. It doesn't. Our consciousness is seated from the tip of our stubbed toe to the top of our itchy scalp, and is affected by our rational minds as much as the vast choirs of microbes (the proverbial aliens in our gates) singing in our guts. The body of any creature is basically a portable antenna for signals of things to be aware of, and from the physical shape of any creature we can derive the general form and functioning of the creature's consciousness and how it experiences the world.

Whatever our body is aware of, and regardless of whether signals come from inside or outside the body (hence 2 Corinthians 12:2), that's our consciousness. Since our body does all the sensing, our consciousness has the general outline of our body — that is to say: our consciousness has no physical parameters but the various faculties of our mind do for the mind what certain body parts do for the body (hence, for instance, the term "eyes of the heart"; Ephesians 1:18). God has no body either, but still he has hands, feet and a heart (and even feathered wings; Psalm 91:4, now see Genesis 1:26) that relate to him the way physical limbs relate to their owner plus their owner's environment.

The notion that our fleshly body is actually the nucleus of our mind is not a novel idea. The Hebrew word for living flesh is בשר (basar), which also means glad tidings; the Greek equivalent is σαρξ (sarx), hence the word sarcasm, which is taking a bite out of someone's conscious identity, rather than their physical bulk. And Jesus said that calling someone "Raca" (empty) or fool is the same kind of thing as physically murdering him (Matthew 5:22). Since the "biopsychosocial model of pain" (1980s) we know that indeed, a snide remark can cause physical pain in a person.

Our human bodies, of course, are the bodies of great apes, who share the land with many other lifeforms. Our minds, however, live in a realm of their own, and their diversity must fill every niche. That means that our mental body plan is only loosely derived from the body of an ape, and may evolve into any branch up from the lung fish (the salamander-sized lobe-finned vertebrate creature that first ventured onto dry land).

All of us started physically as a single-cellular creature (called zygote), and we all spent our first nine months in an aquatic environment inside the body of our mothers. Our free will relates to our evolutionary destiny like the many red-and-black numbers relate to the little green zero on a roulette wheel. Hence Taylor confidently states that we will always find our way back home. Entirely likewise, Socrates taught that all sense of beauty stems from a longing to the heavenly perfection whence we came, suggesting that all of us "remember" our deep ancestry. Whales evolved from cow-like land animals and it's a mystery why they returned to the waters — but perhaps out of a deeply engrained longing for Mom: the emotional counterpart of the development of human rationality that yearns to unite with Dad? The latter is feminine and yearns for perfect governance, but the former is a child and yearns for the Paradise whose fragrances trickle up from the deepest chasms of the sub-consciousness.

Neither in the material sphere nor the mental sphere are wombs or eggs to gestate in. A waxing mind is much more alike a star that emerges from a slowly contracting cloud of dust, then ignites as fusion begins at its core, and burns until all fuel is gone and perhaps inverts into a black hole, whose inner space becomes infinite and whose core regards the whole of the universe (including adjacent black holes that do the same) in a single eternal blink. But still, mentally we also all start at the single-cell phase, and while our bodies have no choice but to become great-ape, our minds may grow to relate to the human kosmos the way any animal relates to the biosphere.

And this means that all human consciousnesses have their general body plan and most of their limbs in common: no matter how diverse our minds are, we are all variations of the same basic land animal:

All of us (even whales) have four limbs, a head on one end and sometimes a tail on the other. The reactionary short-term head-end is specialized in navigation, and obtaining data (by breathing and ingesting) and rapid response to current situations. The long-term tail-end is specialized in general propulsion, gradual data processing, mental body-building and the long time storage of resources. Plants form the base of the food chain and are always attached to the ground. The animal's digestive system says something about the way the mind processes information and turns it into applicable knowledge.

The animal's speed, and thus its legs, say something about how fast the mind can progress logically through a rational environment. We humans think in words but through step-by-step association (one thought leads to another, and to another, and to another, like a thread woven through a fractal carpet; a carpet that ties the whole kosmos together), and our consciousness is really a tapestry of one word (one rational experience) linking to another, and to another and to another. Legs, essentially, are what lifts the animal's rump off the ground of common discourse, and the legs upon which the animal stands (particularly the feet) is what ties the animal to the bedrock: the interface between the immaterial mind and the physical body that speaks and hears and senses while lumbering through the physical world.

As we explain in our article on Tachyons, spacetime is there where all meters and seconds happen, which means that the speed of light (at which lengths become zero and time stops) literally is the edge of the material universe. Since consciousness has a lot to do with memory, and memory is all about reversing the arrow of time, consciousness could be thought of consisting of "particles" that have negative mass and thus faster-than-light speeds (which again suggests that String Theory might not be not-even-wrong). Black holes "see" other black holes around them and thus within them, and it cannot be said whether space contains the black holes or any black hole contains space plus all the other black holes. Likewise, minds "see" other minds, and it cannot be said whether Alice exists in Bob, or Bob in Alice or Alice and Bob both in space. When two infinite spaces meet at a boundary between the two, the boundary will curl around the space the observer is not in. The observer sits in her own infinity but sees someone else in their finite selves.

Carnivorous snake-type creatures have no legs and must exist as one with the food source of herbivores. They must pretend to be a plant. A person with a snake-mind is entirely stuck to the ground and thus entirely physically oriented, and likely obsessed with physical stimuli.

Some of us (dogs, buffalo) have strongly developed upper bodies (highly reactionary) and very little aft end (retained experience). Others (squirrels) are mostly aft end and frequently raise their upper body and front limbs off the ground (off the surface of common discourse, into quiet contemplation). An animal whose front limbs stand on the ground responds rationally (word-wise) to current situations. An animal whose front limbs don't stand on the ground doesn't make rational decisions but follows its emotions, wordless intuition or imagination — not a fantasy but an intuited extrapolation from what can be observed, strongly informed by what was previously learned: the experience that sits in the animal's aft-end. Apes and birds have highly specialized upper bodies and particularly upper limbs.

Note that the earliest recorded feminine ideal is mostly hips (aft end), whereas the modern feminine ideal is mostly boobs and a smiley face (upper end).

It takes some getting used to but even though our physical senses are closely related to our mind, they are physical and not mental. The mind only deals with information, not with physical signals that carry the information. Our minds deal solely with the construction of the glass tree, from the leaves down, making sense of the world around us by establishing relationships between (i.e. categories of) things. This very strongly suggests that any creature that is able to learn from experience, in fact has words inside of it, even though those words are sentimental rather than spiritual: they are felt and thus private, rather than technological and collective. We humans speak because we compare our inner feeling-words and hone them onto our collective point of gravity where our language is seated. But animals indeed have consciousness and words that can be learned.

Our physical eyes see light but our corresponding mental eyes don't. Most generally, our few mental senses detect the direction of a source of desired information (topic-wise, not street map-wise), so that the rest of our mind can go there to obtain it. Dogs and cows and such must lower their heads toward the food source. Apes use their arms to bring the food source to their stationary mouths. Elephants use their amazing opposable noses to brings food to their stationary mouths while still standing on all their four limbs.

As noted above, the consciousness of a single person is self-similar to the consciousness of humanity at large. That means that the individual consciousness of each of us is endowed with a living earth (that's our living self, where all our talking and feeling and living takes place), a central sun (that's the seat of our mechanical ratio and identity, the one that gives life on earth: אור, 'or, light or knowledge) and the shared but highly dynamic center of gravity of all massive bodies around us, of the moon, the sun and the planets (the center of our emotional identity: αγαπη, agape, love or gravity). The difference in position of our earth and our common center of gravity results in drive: the living earth that is our self is emotionally drawn toward that common center of gravity (where water flows to) and intellectually toward the light of the sun (where life grows to).

Our sun is a celestial object that initially forms from a cloud of nature's lightest element: hydrogen. This cloud of hydrogen contracts upon its common center of gravity and in consequence of the pressure there, nuclear fusion commences: four hydrogen atoms (four protons, four electrons and four forcefields between them) become one helium atom (two protons, two neutrons, two electrons and two forcefields) and the difference (two forcefields) is radiated out and the star ignites. The sun of our ratio consists of the atoms of our observations, and nuclear fusion occurs when two observations are clustered together in a single categorical "word", when two phenomena are understood as manifestations of a single entity: a ratio. When a cloud of hydrogen is below a certain mass, it won't ignite and only glow. This suggests that less attentive animals (bugs, slugs and small reptiles, perhaps) don't have words in them. But when the cloud is large enough and ignites, it takes 300,000 thousand years for the released photons to emerge on the surface. That suggests that many animals have words in them but no language between them. When a star gets older and has burned up the available hydrogen, it will begin to forge larger atoms, up to iron. When all fuel has been used up, a smaller star simply fades and dies and very slowly decomposes (whilst continuing to bend space). A star whose mass exceeds a certain lower limit will implode and produce a super nova that sprays its outer layer like a fountain into its environment while its core collapses into a black hole. All elements heavier than iron are forged in such super novae.

The perpetually shape-shifting and sometimes broadly smiling face of the visible moon corresponds to our conscious feelings, our mood: how we think we feel and how we consciously understand our emotions (more precise: our awareness of our own emotional state corresponds to the reflection of the full moon in our emotional waters). But the real center of our emotions, including our subconscious, is the entirely invisible shared center of gravity of sun, moon and planets. A voluptuous and usually childless trophy wife is a wife whose sole function is to reflect the glory of her husband, and to center the gravity of his universe precisely within his own living earth. This may seem like a great situation but when one's center of gravity resides permanently within one's own soul, rather than outside it, one is drawn to nothing and one's earth will neither have tides nor seismic activity, or even daylight, and will in time simply die off. In a single mind, such a permanent full moon can only be achieved by devoted drug use: a constant state of non-rational sleep, a focus on one's perceived feelings and an emotional center smack on top of the seat of one's desire (so no drive to go elsewhere).

The natural phases of the mental equivalent of the physical moon is why we are so often surprised by our own sentiments and can't understand where our internal volatility comes from. We consciously "feel" one way but end up acting as if we "feel" some whole other way. This demonstrates that the visible moon (the part of our feelings that we are consciously aware of) isn't a good beacon to draw guidance from: its shape-shifting smiling face simply does not point toward our emotional core but away from it. The conflict between the obvious but foolish moon (our feelings) and the obscure but wise center of gravity (our subconscious) is one of the most popular tropes in literature — it's deployed wherever a dumb blonde and wise brunette clash, probably most iconically in Singing In The Rain, (1952), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).

In the ever perennial story of Peter Pan, Captain James Hook is the sun (or whoever rules the earth in the sun's stead, during the winter of our discontent) and his hook is the moon (propaganda, crowd manipulation, drugs; we'll get into this further below). Wendy is the emotional center of gravity and the Lost Boys are the planets. The green-clad Peter, of course, is the living earthling who is formed, aroused and affected by the spiel of the celestials. The image of the solar captain James and his lunar hook is most anciently depicted as a bow (moon) and arrow (sun), and in turn the obvious (albeit probably subconscious) inspiration of such emblems as the Byzantine star and crescent, and the Soviet Union's hammer and sickle.

The Bible's version of all this tells of Jacob (same as Jack or James or Jimmy), the whole world's solar light-giver, who would become the singular patriarch of the people of Israel thanks to Israel's four matriarchs, namely Leah plus Zilpah and Rachel plus Bilhah — where Leah and Rachel were daughters of the Mesopotamian Laban, whose name means Moon (i.e. White One: the shape-shifting smiling face of the moon).

• Leah became the mother of half of the tribes of Israel, among whom Levi, from whom came Moses the Law-Giver, and also Elizabeth and Mary, the mothers of John and Jesus. Also from Leah came Judah, and thus the Jews: King David and Joseph the father-by-law of Jesus. Leah also gave birth to Jacob's only daughter, Dinah, whose violation resulted in Levi's signature landlessness and Israel's absorption of the women and children of Shechem. Both Israel and Shechem were mere families at the time, meaning that from then on, Israel was an Aramean-Canaanite hybrid.
• From Leah's Zilpah came Asher (means Happy), and hence Anna the Prophetess (Luke 2:36), and Gad (means Fortune). Note that Judah means Praise, with a strong connotation of social felicity, the very meaning of the Greek word χαρις (charis), which in turn, as mentioned earlier, is the vehicle of salvation (Ephesians 2:28). The sons of Jacob are very obviously elements of human mentality, not biological offspring.
• From Rachel came the tribes of Joseph, the quintessential dreamer (who flourished in Egypt's Heliopolis, or Sun City), and Benjamin (the murderous mini-tribe from whom came king Saul, queen Esther and saint Paul).
• From Rachel's Bilhah came Dan, whose name means Judge, from whom came Samson, whose name means Solar Man, or Rational Man (perhaps also the inspiration behind Soul Man by Sam and Dave, 1967, and Mannish Boy by Muddy Waters, 1955).

But a greater duo, far greater than the common blonde and brunette, are the Ginger Child (manhood starts in adulthood: womanhood covers all women and children, boys and girls, that live with the women) and the White Haired Ancient Of Days. The wooing of these two requires the sort of mental power that most people simply don't have, and ordinary people only very rarely encounter and that mostly by accident. Of these two, the more common is the Ginger Child (depicted most obviously in king David, and per tradition in Esther). The Ginger Child appears when the sun, the earth and the moon are perfectly aligned, and the earth's shadow suddenly eclipses the full moon (and the observer suddenly switches from a wild emotional state, 2 Samuel 6:14, to feeling nothing at all, 6:23) and the stars appear (Genesis 15:5, Daniel 12:3, Nehemiah 4:21). In one single human mind, this happens in the night (when one's own sun has set and one is sleeping, and the scene regarded depicts the subconscious) and one's own feelings (fears, concerns, desires) are blocked out and one gets to behold the suns of thousands of other people. Such a night vision comes with the humbling understanding that one's own sun sits where it does by merit of the multitude it is part of: both light-wise and gravity-wise. Those kinds of dreams are intuitively clairvoyant, and are associated with Israel's House of Joseph (Genesis 37:5, which in turn explains why Jesus' earthly Jewish father was called Joseph: Matthew 1:20, 2:12, 2:13, 2:19, 2:22).

The most devastating experience that a human mind can have, however, is an encounter with the White Haired Ancient Of Days (as described in Daniel 7:9 — the "of days" part refers to the sun; the moon is "of months": Genesis 1:14). This encounter happens in broad daylight, when one is wide awake and entirely alert: when the moon of one's perceived feelings is perfectly invisible and yet moves in front of one's rational mind and blocks it out entirely. When that happens, the sun disappears and the consistency of reality ceases to exist and one enters a state of utter madness. People who don't know what's happening go insane, and stay insane even when the moon moves on and the environment of the mind returns to normal. Such a vision is one we can't unsee. Its experience is the experience of death (hence John 10:17).

People who do understand what's going on are people who have complete control over the movement of their own heavenly bodies: people who can willfully stop their own earth from turning and maneuver the invisible moon of their perceived emotions in front of the stationary sun of their own rational minds (Joshua 10:12-13, see John 10:18). Such people can willfully roll the day's sky away like a scroll (Isaiah 34:4, Revelation 6:14) and tune into the light and gravity of the Host of Heaven (all planets, stars, black holes and dark matter), which comprises the light and love of everybody around them. Their own ratio, obscured by the invisible body of their subconscious, begets a fiery corona (hence the white hair). Such a procedure, a solar eclipse, is the greatest thing that can be done with a single mind. In Hebrew this is called שחר (shahar). A community of people doing this in unison is indescribable.

This all may seem rather alien and outlandish, but it really isn't. When such a visionary willfully evokes the view upon the Ancient Of Days, she sees stars that have the same spectrum as her own. Stars that have another spectrum are invisible to her. And so, a musician-visionary who looks upon the Ancient One, beholds in one glance the state of affairs in the entire music world. And so, her next song reflects not her own insights and feelings but those of the entire market — and becomes a colossal hit (Proverbs 3:5-6). An investor who invests according to his own tastes and desires will very soon be parted from his principal. But an investor who senses the sentiments of all other investors, becomes very rich indeed. A king who governs according to his own leanings will get an uprising in return. But a king who picks up on the sensitivities of his entire people, will be loved like a husband.

Jesus of Nazareth is celebrated as the first human with the ability to consciously see all stars of all colors. He gave everybody the ability to willfully evoke the Vision of the Ancient Of Days, and all colors so seen combine into White (snow is white because light in ice crystals refracts in a dazzling multitude of rainbows, that add up to white). In our present times, the masculine Big Tech is harvesting data in order to achieve precisely the same thing: to attain a singular view on the dynamics of the sea of everybody's private minds. Big Tech is Big Death, of course. Its feminine counterpart, Big Life, depends on doing these things with one's own living mind.

The human mind, both the personal mind and the global collective one, is a fantastically complex affair, and as with any field of explanation, fakers abound in droves. The rule is very simple: any explainer whose explanations places the explainer at the center of the customer's attentions is to be avoided like the plague. An explainer who uses their insights to create the mysteries that inspires the audience to set out on their own journey, is the one to pay attention to. An explainer who painstakingly calculates the details of their customer's fate, will never find them all and can't assess the relative weight of any of them. An explainer who sees a person's nature and fate in one explosive vision, sends that person away in some general direction and with some vague task.

When one has learned to move one's own earth in between one's solar ratio and the lunar perception of one's own feelings, one is effectively able to obscure one's private feelings, specifically one's desire, anger and fear, in order to behold the ratios of other people. This ability allows a person to obey the Bible's most repeated command, namely to have no fear (or anger), which is also the command the Logos issued when he first engaged mankind (Genesis 15:1 says: "... the Word of YHWH came to Abraham"; it does not say: "... the Lord said to Abraham").

The words we vocally utter are muddy blobs: a little bit or solid data and a lot of emotional waters. Someone else's intoned words tend to stir our waters and induce feelings within us. When those received words are offensive to us, they induce anger and shame: their impacts heat up our oceans and form emotional clouds in a roaring atmosphere that obscure our view upon both our rational sun and reflective moon and we are left without words or clear thoughts or understanding of our feelings. Someone with mastery over their own mind is able to prevent their earth from being bombarded by alien asteroids that cause blinding upheaval (by moving the other planets to intercept incoming objects).

From an earthly point of view, the function of the great gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn), as well as the moon, is to shield our living earth from incoming crap. And when our living earth is constantly in a state of steamy turmoil, our outer sentinels might be exhausted. This is solved by having one's rational machine (the sun) emit wavelengths that correspond to the giants' colors, so that they can absorb energy and effectively become more massive. Heliocentricity is only true on a material plane. Life is enthroned upon the third rock, and has the authority to position itself where it wants within the solar system and request the color of the Machine that is our sun and the Mirror that is the moon.

Mankind's collective mind is self-similar to any individual one. And any individual one can have a sun perpetually below the horizon (animals) or above it (humans). Its earths can have sunny skies and full moons, or nothing but storms and drama. But either way, it appears that the dazzling complexities of the mind actually have a mere few major moving parts, whose nature and interactions have been exhaustively described by the ancients. The Bible, simply, depicts the anatomy of the mind.

All this implies that we should be able to devise a system of psychology that is based on the wisdom obtained by the world's space exploration institutes. One may ask: can anything good come from NASA? To which anybody with a sense of humor would reply: Come and see!

All these patterns very strongly urge for the creation of a new scientific discipline, one that merges God's two witnesses of ancient Scriptures (feminine) and modern physics (masculine). And they imply that in a very near future, we should be able to repair people's minds the way we now repair their bodies, and assess and understand their mental natures from a discrete data set, like we now assess bodies from their DNA. Here at Abarim Publications we would further propose the hypothesis that, upon the reparation of humanity's battered minds, all minds will settle in a great common consciousness that will allow mankind to traverse the galaxy simply by inner exploration.

Animals without language exchange information by touch. But animals with language can use language to "telephone" each other over great distances. It's not the physical proximity that allows for an intimate relationship but the faithful exchange of information via some kind of technology. Instead of bouncing about in clunky rockets, we will be able to zip through space by zipping through our own collective thoughts, not in nuts-and-bolts contraptions of lifeless metals but in a living Machine made from consciousness: a Machine like a vast pixelated cloud of little gold spheres of pure ratio that all securely contain a tiny liquid tear of pure emotion.

Our human ape-body consists of trillions of cells, which are all faithful executions of the same genetic code — meaning there is no one and only "true" dogma that explains the DNA of a multi-cellular organism, but a whole cluster of vastly differing executions that somehow work together. Some of our body cells conduct electricity, some contract when the urge occurs, some are transparent, some produce hairs and some produce stomach acid; all in faithful following of the same foundational code. It's the Oneness of the many variations that defines any large organism.

But something similar appears to exist as the fundament of our consciousness: a kind of mental DNA around which the vast body of our human identity forms. This foundational code doesn't simply generate one single consciousness but a closely knit cluster of variations upon some core code, the cooperation of which adds up to that which we call "Self". And just like our private bodies don't look at all similar to the double helix of our genetic core, so the intricate dynamic we call "Self" is not at all the same as the mental algorithm it's a manifestation of.

For lack of a better word, let's call that foundational code of our Self what the Bible calls it: our "name" — which is not an arbitrary appellation like Bob, Alice, Thing One or Thing Two, but a somehow-summary of who we are, our שם (shem) or ονομα (onoma); not a fixed snippet but a plastic one that is continuously augmented by the mental equivalent of DNA methylation. Perhaps someday we can develop the technology to directly read our shem the way we read our DNA, and read all about a person's life from their own records.

Our awareness is commonly a great deal smaller than our identity because we commonly have no idea how the story of two very remote observers of us relate. But to Bob we may be an acid producer whereas to Alice we are entirely transparent. As long as our awareness is not the same as our identity, we are incomplete and have residual darkness in us (see The Fox Who Wasn't There, below).

We may wonder where our name came from, but that's the wrong way around because the name comes first (in reaction to creative forces in the oneness of the mental sphere: Isaiah 43:1), and the self grows like a stalagmite around it (John 12:32). When Adam named the animals (Genesis 2:19-20), he gave them the names according to his own definition of them, according to their identity in his mind, not the definition with which God had initially called them into being, their actual shem, their identity in God's mind.

The Bible promises that our awareness may grow to wholly coincide with our identity. Then we will know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12), which means that we will know the entire universe (including all of history). This doesn't necessarily means that we are up to snuff with all the individual goings on in the universe — even God does not know what all the particles are up to; the core nature of quantum particles holds the rule that their location and speed cannot simultaneously be known; this in turn demonstrates the intimate overlap of matter and consciousness, and implies that these are fundamentally the same — but rather that our shem is the same as the shem of the universe, which is Logos, the Word (or Name) of God (Revelation 2:17; see Genesis 4:26).

Everybody knows that the material universe expanded out of a Singularity and will go on expanding until it reaches Heat Death, which is the situation in which the particles are so very far apart that no relations between them are possible or will ever again occur. Life, most amazingly, arose not in a Singularity but rather in a Heat Death, when the first living things began to be and had no idea of who they were and that there were countless others in the space around them. From this primal state of utter anti-socialness, life evolved, discovered the others and began to communicate and build colonies, networks, societies, cities and finally mankind that studied creation onto the grand unified understanding that would allow them to unite with God the way a bride unites with her groom.

In the material universe, entropy overall must always increase, and if locally the entropy becomes less, it must increase more somewhere else. Since Einstein, we know that time is just another dimension and some-where may also be some-when. And so the universe is perfectly allowed to produce highly ordered DNA at one temporal locality (some-when), while slowly paying it back over time by the increased chaos that living things make (a living thing makes more chaos than an inanimate object could by utterly turning to dust). Matter seeks to fall apart just as much as life seeks to unify. Evolution has several mechanisms, but its primary drive is the mind's innate desire to unify and reduce entropy to zero — and beyond! (i.e. to create more information than the system contains, to imagine.)

In Job 38:1 and 40:6, God speaks out of the whirlwind and the Latin term "evolution" — that is e(x), out of, and volvo, to roll or wind around — originally described the unrolling of a scroll. Evolution theory, or the study of unfolding, has been an obsession of the world's wisdom classes since they compiled the king lists of Egypt or the fourth and fifth chapters of Genesis. And so that nobody could claim that they didn't know what the Bible was about, grand-matriarch Eve was emphatically dubbed the Mother Of The Whole Of Life — אם ('am), mother or people; כל (kol), all, everything or the [perfect] whole (כלה, kalla, means bride); חי (hay), life — what we moderns call the biosphere (Genesis 3:20).

In the bio-world of physical bodies and sexual reproduction, it's crucially important whether one is a boy or a girl. In the algorithmic world of the mind, however, private genders simply don't exist. Or as Paul put it: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all One in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

As soon as God wrapped Adam and Eve into the first clothes (Genesis 3:21), humanity began to walk away from the bio-world and entered the mental world, where individuals present themselves as increasingly genderless avatars powered by increasingly obscured animal cores. Animals can't change their clothes but humans can, which in part is what makes us human. Our humanity derives from our human world, which is a world full of products that have no gender — clothing, coffee cups, cars, shoes: none of these have genders, and can only hide but not extend the gender of the user/wearer or even reveal the gender of their creator: humanity has no gender.

Better yet: one's beliefs are either emotional or they are rational. When they are rational, they are shared and thus confirmed by at least one other party. When they are emotional, they are private and thus physical and part of our naked self. Rational beliefs are expressed in clothing (and cars and houses and all that) and have no gender. Emotional (and thus personal) beliefs are physical and only shared with one's equally naked sexual partner (with whom one is hence one). Rational beliefs are as obvious as one's outfit, whereas one's personal beliefs are covered by one's rational beliefs and (if the need arises) to be guessed at and inferred by the eager audience. Humanity once thought that sensible and responsible dresses would help the observer make such inference, but now that we're increasingly moving toward a genderless rationality, our clothing too becomes much less gender specific. Still, some of us wear very little in public, bikinis and tangas at best (1% ratio and 99% obvious feelings), whereas other people wrap themselves in vast wardrobes fearing some physical skin might show (99% ratio and 1% obvious feelings). There's probably a perfect middle road somewhere in there.

The digital world is an offshoot of the mental world, and indeed, it's entirely irrelevant whether the formulator of some scientific algorithm, the builder of some machine or the coder of some script was a man or a woman, employee or freelancer, gay, straight or spiral, black, white, green or blue. Our precious human world is presently in a transition between the physical farm world of dapper lads and feisty maidens, and the utterly genderless meta-world of pure thought. That transition isn't happening without the usual pangs, and all the usual people are slinging the usual mud across the divide from both sides without understanding anything. That too is all according to informed expectation.

Fortunately for the rest of us, in Hebrew the genders are carefully defined: a woman is someone who desires to be governed (Genesis 3:16), whereas a man is someone who desires to govern. That in turn means that femininity is the tendency toward collectivity (any cooperating collective that maintains a formal border between the group and anything but the group), whereas masculinity is the tendency toward individuality (which naturally results in competition between men).

A woman, in a nutshell, is someone who first brings about her own perfection, physically and mentally, which starts with respecting the hand she was dealt. Then, when she is as perfectly harmonious as she can be on her own, she will desire for greatness beyond herself: someone to come into her and infuse her with life beyond her own potential. The worst mistake a woman can make is to settle for less: someone who is unworthy of her. She will forfeit her own divinity and her own consistency. Instead of a knowledge of only good, she will obtain knowledge of good and evil. The lesser man will fill her with shadow. She will begin to differentiate between what she desires and what she got stuck with. She will become polytheistic.

Polytheistic pagans like to believe that the world is run by kings and thus men who shape the world by solemn decree and competing with other men, while women obey and suffer. The divine design of the natural world, however, makes it clear that the natural world is run by queens who chose their kings according to their queenly good humor, which in turn is formed from the quantum impact pattern of the popular society that the queen embodies. Everybody knows that the Almighty God is the masculine ruler of heaven and earth, but unlike any pagan deity, the God of the Bible desires to serve and be freely and enthusiastically chosen by his sovereign queen. Every brute can dominate, and every fool can attract some helpless hungry orphan girl, but the Bible writers understood that the paragon of masculinity is having earned the love of a magnificent woman.

God is masculine, and since everything originates in him, so does femininity. That means that femininity is not an external opposite but an internal aspect of masculinity. This in turn explains why Eve came from a rib of Adam. Literary license would have allowed the author of this story to have Eve come from anywhere, from the sea, from the sky, from clouds or foam or a volcano or the freshly plowed earth, but instead the Hebrew tradition maintained that she came from within Adam. This also clearly implies that the Hebrews realized that a man has femininity in him (namely an X-sperm), but that a woman has a Y-chromosome in her only when a man put it there.

The natural world the way we have it, with all its many species and splendors, is the result of females choosing males, not of males enforcing law. Natural reality is matrilocal, which means that the groom leaves his place of origin and joins the tribe of the bride: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" (Genesis 2:24; hence also Revelation 21:22-23 and the name Immanuel, or God With Us; pagan gods are separate and distant and often live on mountain summits from where they tyrannize humankind).

And that means that in a matrilocal society, all wives, sisters, aunts, nieces and grandmothers are intimately related and know and support each other and comprise society's cultural infrastructure and set the norms, whereas all husbands are first generation immigrants who are appreciated for bringing along exotic novelties but have little network power and spend most of their day getting used to things. Femininity is all about the collective, cooperation, inclusion and making a bordered home, whereas masculinity is all about the individual, competition, exclusion and roaming about, seeking something to knab. A matrilocal society is domestic, peaceful, democratic, republican and diverse but egalitarian. A patrilocal society is peripatetic, bellicose, dictatorial, tyrannical and uniform but viciously unfair. Men glorify the strong and kill the weak. Women cherish the weak and are the strong.

When in 1859, Charles Darwin first formally introduced evolution theory to the masses, the ideological world was in a slow swing toward the patrilocal extreme, and Darwin picked up on only one of the two main evolutionary mechanisms, the masculine one, namely the familiar Survival Of The Fittest. Half a century later — Goethe's Der Zauberlehrling is from 1797, Paul Dukas' L'Apprenti Sorcier is from 1897; Disney's integrated version came in 1940; for the alter Besen, see Isaiah 14:23 — the hyper-masculine world began to descend into war and chaos, and classical evolution theory proved unable to explain the origin of species. The part that was missing, or simply denied, was the feminine principle: the Third Tribe principle, the Survival Of The Weakest.

Also in 1859, Charles Dickens published a Tale Of Two Cities. Evidently intuiting the urgent profundity of this novel, fellow story tellers adapted Dicken's tale into movies in 1911, 1917, 1922, 1927, 1935, 1958 and 1980. In 1984, Frankie Goes To Hollywood released Two Tribes, which became one of the most successful singles of all time.

A homogeneous population that loses its feminine consistency will inevitably make the mistake of beginning to self-organize upon a naturally fittest alpha (1 Samuel 8:7), like a hydrogen cloud contracting upon a common center of gravity. But as soon as this fittest alpha is in position, he will seek to arrest society's organic self-organization and willfully appoint a supporting chorus of adulating betas: individuals who will continue to congratulate him with his new clothes but who will certainly not challenge his fitness but rather seek to benefit from it and thus protect him from those who might. These unfit usurper betas push away the fit betas and surround themselves with equally unfit gammas, whereas the fit gammas again get pushed out.

While the contest for the top spot is going on and the population can move fluidically, society organizes itself naturally and meritocratically. But as soon as the top spot is taken, and the alpha can fortify his position with an external ring of power, society crystalizes from the top down and everything stagnates and seeks to preserve the status quo. The alpha will declare societal laws whose sole function is to keep him in power, and appoint a law-enforcing police force whose sole function is to keep him in power.

That means that the principle of Survival Of the Fittest must eventually hit an asymptotic ceiling beyond which it cannot go: the ceiling onto which any local alpha can form the world into his own image.

Whatever fluidity remains in such a diseased society is squeezed to the outer ranges of the tribe's territory. There, on the tribe's very perimeter (on its sweaty skin, or north of its icy wall, if you please), roam the nerds, the weak, the outcast, the unruly and the potential contenders. Stretched dangerously thin, they will begin to invest in dynamic communication rather than the static ideals of the status quo, and whatever loyalty to their masculine alpha may linger, it is quickly replaced by loyalty to the feminine identity of their group that flows dynamically about the petrified tribe's borders.

If such a crystalized tribe sits in the middle of nowhere, the feminine outer layer will always remain an outcast slave-girl, who forages in the wilderness for food and sleeps on the threshold of the outer gate of her master's castle. But if the territory of this tribe borders that of another tribe, and that second tribe has also succumbed to masculine atrophy and its outcasts have likewise tumbled down society's angle of repose and into the gutter that surrounds the castle's mountain, the two outcast populations will inevitably meet and recognize much more kinship in each other than either of their alphas. The nerds from both tribes will begin to intermingle and form a Third Tribe, a hybrid tribe of refugees. And instead of only circling their own tribe of origin, they will begin to also circle the other in a kind of super-dynamic figure eight, like electrons around nucleic cores, like blood around cells, like a fishing net that catches the souls of greater beings.

Everybody has their own microbiome (tiny creatures living on our skin and inside our orifices and bowels), but kissing and mating lovers largely share theirs. From a purely logistic perspective: the seed of the man enters the woman via the outer realm of the microbiome, very much the way the wise men from the east came along the commercial trade routes to visit Jerusalem, very much the way a mailman might blend in with the drifting bums. The difference, obviously, is that the mailman always rings twice (Deuteronomy 17:6).

Two (or more) groups of tiny outcasts will unify and form a Third Tribe: a tribe unlike the two masculine ones, one that is purely feminine and fluidic (or "Mercurial", says Yuri Slezkine in contrast of the stationary "Apollonian" masculine tribes). And if they gather enough mass (from more likewise atrophied tribes), they will become much stronger than any of their alphas ever were and ultimately easily overwhelm them.

The classical symbol of the small Third-Tribe outcast is the mouse or rat (hence also Mickey, which is Disney's belittling take on the Man of Sorrows — see our free e-book Weird Patterns in History and Movies for much more on this). More modern (mostly as a film trope) are the ubiquitous references to mailmen, post offices (Men in Black II, 2002), postal delivery vans (Ready Player One, 2018), or references to garbage disposal, taking out trash (Galaxy Quest, 1999), garbage trucks (Hellboy, 2004), suburban sewers (Constantine, 2005) and hence suburbia as mise-en-scene (The Burbs, 1989, and about half of Spielberg's work).

In recent times, a famous Third Tribe event occurred in 2008 with the launch of Bitcoin, which emerged anonymously in the financial gutters between the world's fiat currencies.

From the waters inevitably rises dry land. But when of one continuum the two extremes move too far apart — the rich from the poor, the wise from the ignorant, the mighty from the weak, the holy from the world at large — or in other words, when the land doesn't stop rising, it must spawn a volcano and the volcano will erupt and cover everything in sizzling lava. Then rain will fall and erode the land, until all of it has been submerged, and the cycle must start again (hence the destruction of Sodom: Ezekiel 16:49, hence Waterworld, 1995). These wild swings dampen over time and ultimately the geological system will settle in a dynamic landscape in which countless paradisal gardens slowly rise over many eons, peak and gradually submerge again, always shaped by ever changing rivers and a few diminished oceans ("gardens beneath which rivers flow," in the words of the Prophet; hence Dubai's striking World archipelago, and of course Avatar: the Way of Water, 2022).

People who are not engineers like to think that smoke demonstrates the presence of fire, but that's not so. Smoke demonstrates an incomplete combustion: a lack of oxygen or a lack of having a use for elements that won't convert or fall apart and that came along with the useful stuff. A perfect fire (and these surely exist) has no smoke, and as long as there are sources of smoke (volcanoes, imperfect ovens, industrial chimneys), even one, the world is polytheistic, unstable and violent, contenders abound and the weak are killed, the skies are darkened and the sun cannot be seen (only felt, that is: the ever-shifting center of gravity the sun shares with the moon and planets).

Stability occurs when not the mountain's steamy summit but the sun is recognized as the center of it all, and when populations willingly, cheerfully and whole-heartedly settle for the sun's governance and the life it yields, wondering how it could ever have been different. Polytheism must inevitably invest in the eradication of contenders and nerds alike. Monotheism is that in which everything has its place, where the strong are recognized by their care of the weak, and nobody disagrees in the slightest with the goings on, or challenges the sun's authority.

Monotheism only exists in wholesale harmony, and if consciousness is indeed a fundamental property of nature (and can only change form but not become more or less), then just like gravity does to matter, love will bring all consciousness together in one single awareness of all identities and their invisible relationships: the wood of the tree of life. That means that if there are indeed some snippets of god-desiring consciousness at the bottom of the deepest sea, no matter how alien to us humans, then mankind cannot be whole unless it finds a way to properly merge with those.

We clever humans know a lot about life, how it behaves and how it evolves, yet we are largely clueless about what "soul" actually is, where it came from and how it sticks to and manipulates material stuff (said otherwise: we don't know how God's breath sticks to Adam's nostrils, Genesis 2:7, and doesn't waft right back out again). Likewise the human mind: we've been looking at it for a while now but we don't quite know what it is and where it came from, and how it relates to and communicates with the biological body, or even whether it might directly move matter without the intervention of a biological limb.

Here at Abarim Publications we don't know either, but lacking better ideas, we would propose to define a living thing as any compound of multiple atoms that is able to store absorbed energy in its inter-atomic bonds rather than convert it into the excitation of individual atoms (that's heat). Likewise, a mind emerges from a compound of multiple cells that is able to store information in its inter-cellular bonds rather than in the cells themselves (in DNA). That suggests that a brain is not simply the store of information (like data on a hard drive or water in a barrel), but rather the information itself, which is stored in a language that comprises words made from inter-neural links, and whose meaning derives from the context provided by adjacent links between neurons (likewise, in Triple Frontier, 2019, the money that was expected to be in the house, actually formed the walls of the house: the money was the house and the house was the money; a similar idea was explored in The House with a Clock in its Walls, 1973/2018, which in turn rips off The Borrowers, 1952/1992). We remember things because thoughts are stored in fractals: thoughts within thoughts within thoughts, like Russian dolls, all linked together by associations.

Since a so-called "black body" absorbs and radiates light of all wavelengths, a living thing is a transfinitely black thing. Transfinity reverses the arrow of time, which explains memory.

We humans share the material realm with all physical things, and the rules that govern the material world don't acknowledge a difference between an eighty kilo boulder, an eighty kilo tree or an eighty kilo gorilla: to gravity, these are all the same. We humans share the biological realm with all living things, and the rules that govern the biosphere don't see a difference between an eighty kilo gorilla and an eighty kilo human. But the consciousness realm we have entirely to ourselves. Our current hypothesis proposes that all these three realms evolve autonomously, from their own Beginning onward, and via predictable symmetry breaches, and that all emerging structures emerge naturally in response to niches that form within the inviolable oneness of the whole. And that is the reason why the realm of consciousness is exactly as diverse as the biosphere. They are self-similar; they are the same melody played on different instruments.

The substance of consciousness is information (what energy is to atoms and soul to life), but its quantum is the word (in whatever form). Below the energy levels at which particles can exist, there is quantum foam. Likewise, below the levels at which words can exist, there is mental foam (hence Aphrodite, or Our Lady Of The Foam). A word is only a word when it exists in two or more heads (Matthew 18:20), which means that language is always communal and never private (a private "language" is not a language, just a lot of noise). That in turn means that language is literally an environment through which all of us speakers meander, picking up available information as we graze along.

Language is an environment, a space to walk through, but always a place we share with others. Every language is a specific ecosystem, whose nature supports its own specific diversity of lifeforms (speakers of that language). That means that the diversity of speakers within a specified language (English, Greek, Hebrew) is self-similar to the diversity of animals within a specified ecosystem (steppe, savanna, rainforest ocean). These "animals" can be recognized after their kind, and their general behavior can be largely predicted once their general species is nominated (given a name, what Adam did).

Proper and descriptive speech is about creating patterns, about connecting dots that are words that represent the real things that make up the reality that we share with others. And although the words at our disposal are the same, the way we link them together can differ as much as a rabbit and a buffalo that exist side by side in the same prairie and eat the same grass.

In our article on the name Hebrew we explain in much more detail why language is a space — and how a language has innate intelligence (independent of the intelligence of the speaker), which corresponds to the complexity of the patterns that exist between the words, long before any story starts (webs of etymology, metaphors, tropes, archetypes, and so on). Hebrew is incomparably more complex than English, a three-dimensional rainforest compared to English' flat prairie, in which a vast diversity of living things gave rise to the great ape family, of which the weakest runt was driven out like Abraham from Ur, and took to wandering the great plains and in time inherited the earth.

And no, these simian meek that inherited the earth are not some specific race or religion; the overwhelming majority of Hebrew speakers are just as smart and insightful as the speakers of any other language. But it's true that these simians of the mind originated in the Semitic language jungle but were driven out and made their home on the Indo-European prairies.

They're still with us today, these simian meek, but there's no name for them, so to the untrained eye they are indistinguishable from regular humans. A trained eye, however, easily recognizes their obvious traces in culture like trails in a bubble chamber. They are a non-breeding community of terrestrial eternals — whose identity and relation to common mortals is playfully entertained in movies like Highlander (1986), The Old Guard (2020) and Eternals (2021), as well as the otherwise hard to explain character of the human vampire, from Abraham Stoker's Dracula (1897), to Louis de Pointe du Lac (1976; Anne Rice is an obviously sympathetic author), to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), and Van Helsing (2004; penned by less enthusiast authors).

The literary vampire is obviously an extension of the more primitive antisemitic myth of blood-libel: the absurd idea that Jews consume physical human blood, which they don't. This nonsensical idea probably emerged when well-informed commentators tried to explain to ignorant polytheists that complex society has a soul that derives from the integrated whole of the individual souls of every individual living human (and one's soul is in one's blood: see Leviticus 17:11). It's the same social mechanism that became imagined as the radiating and bleeding ("drink my blood") heart of Christ: the nuclear fusion at the heart of society, which makes society ever smarter as it continues to forge ever heavier intellectual atoms and bleed off excessive forcefields from its productive core, heating up society around it with ever smarter toys to play with — hence also the ubiquitous smithing dwarf of Norse and German mythologies.

The material realm has atoms but also vast fields: the Higgs field and the electromagnetic field, while gravity creates the hills and dales of the universe at large. As proposed earlier, DNA may have formed upon Chladni patterns generated from rotating black holes, rained to earth like actual "ancient aliens", drew large molecules onto itself and organized them into cell bodies that subsequently began to store energy in compounds and thus sprang to life. The terrestrial soulical realm (the biosphere), likewise, has living beings but also the hydrological cycle and the wind and earth's tectonic goings on. The consciousness realm (the world of words), likewise has conscious minds but also emotions (the waters under the earth) and the rational super-conscious (the heavens in the sense of the sky; in our discussion of birds, below, we'll see that super-consciousness sounds hotter than it really is).

Land drinks rain and pees rivers that slowly erode the dry-land rocks. Language-land too drinks and pees, but emotions and sentiments that slowly erode information and established definitions. As we discussed above, all identity is dry-land narrative, and "you" are the story of you, continuously assessed and corrected by yourself and your peers. A living being is not at all alike a solid object but much rather alike a tornado that forms from an accumulation of energy in the air, picks up the dust that forms its body and continues its path eating and secreting until its lifespan is over and the air returns to the atmosphere it never stopped being part of and the dust falls back to the earth it never stopped being part of (Ecclesiastes 12:7). The difference, of course, between a tornado and a living mind is that a living mind has a shem. That shem exists prior to the body, and the body forms after the shem rather than the other way around. The shem never perishes but always continues to adapt as a part of an ever perfecting ecosystem.

Post-Biblical Hebrew sages developed the principle of Gilgul, a kind of reincarnation. It's a complicated affair — the name Gilgul, meaning cycle, closely relates to Galilee, meaning circuit, and Golgotha, meaning skull — but perhaps in essence understood by the journey of the eternal but transforming shem through life upon life, like a spoon scooping up helping after helping. The popular gimmick of remembering previous lives probably does not apply, or at least not in the way it is commonly presented, but indeed it seems possible to transfer information from life to life. But there's a catch.

Earlier we discussed how the body of a conscious gorilla may be regarded as the nucleus of a tiny core of eternal righteousness encapsulated by a huge layer of temporary unrighteousness (unrighteous is a rather big word, but in this context it simply means not eternal but temporal: bound to a temporal locality). The core of eternal righteousness would correspond to a person's personal interpretation of the eternal Logos, whereas the thick layer of unrighteousness has to do with the person's reactions to their locality upon the timeline. Said otherwise: that part of us that is governed and energized by the understanding that all is one and action equals reaction, is eternal. That part of us that is governed and energized by our attachment to our iPhone, our status updates, our fear of AI, concerns about the latest news, fashions, and the rights and wrongs of society around us including our familiars and loved ones — all things that depend on their relativity to our specific point in time — are temporal.

A person's righteous core (or covenantal ark) is eternal, and its unrighteous mantel (or tent or tabernacle: 2 Corinthians 5:1) is temporary and falls away upon the person's death, taking much of the person's identity with it. That means that the continuum of consciousness is carried only by the righteous cores, and all unrighteousness is mere noise. Anyone who remembers righteousness from a previous life can't really tell it apart from present righteousness, so sure, we "remember" previous lives only when they can't be distinguished from the present one. Perhaps when someone reincarnates sideways (neither up nor down) and close in space and time to their previous life, they might encounter objects that seem familiar enough to count as memories. But whatever righteousness we now realize has never not existed. That's why our righteous memories go back all the way to the Big Bang, and perhaps even beyond. And the best part is: once we identify with our eternal core rather than our temporal mantel, we can zip to any point on the timeline and manifest a temporary tabernacle around our eternal ark and have a look around. Earlier we mentioned a simulation that plays the entire history of our planet in real time, produced by our future descendants. That wasn't speculation (Hebrews 13:2, Genesis 32:1, Matthew 26:53).

The principle of Gilgul tells of one Logos but many incarnations — one Eternal Father (Isaiah 9:6) from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its shem (Ephesians 3:15) — just like an organism's single genetic code produces the countless different cell-types of the body, from which the indivisible soul (and eternal mind and consciousness) emerges like Jesus from the grave, but which in turn is the primary seed around which the body forms (it's a chicken-or-egg thing, a matter-antimatter or action-reaction thing: it's one thing with two sides).

The individual cells of our body live a mere few months, and are simply replaced when they die (their genetic core is duplicated and the old cell-body is destroyed and a new identical one woven around the copy), so that the total body can keep going for eighty years. When our eighty year old body finally kicks the bucket, it too is simply replaced, so that our shem can keep going for much, much longer.

The biosphere is like a drilling rig that drills toward righteousness (eleutheria, freedom-by-law) out of some deeply rooted collective craving (Romans 8:19). Technological humans are the actual trail-blazing drill bit, and the most progressive and inventive humans the drill bit's diamond cutting edge. The single purpose of the entire drilling installation is for the whole thing to arrive at eleutheria, and for this, spent parts get replaced, perfected, upgraded or downgraded and discarded. The rig gets periodic upgrades, which corresponds to great extinctions and useful shems get reinserted and worthless ones get dumped. And it appears that occasionally, the drill bit gets replaced — which is an event rather more alike periodically harvesting the fruits of a tree (meaning that we humans are not the first batch to be picked, see Genesis 5:24, Matthew 9:37 and the Silurian hypothesis, and this in turn implies that previous batches are still with us, guiding us from above, like a kind of spiritual wine for us terrestrials to sip from).

Perhaps the drilling rig metaphor is too simple a rendering, but it's nevertheless prudent to realize that a single cell of a human's body has no purpose but to serve the whole, and likewise a single human life has no purpose other than the mission of leading the whole of life to salvation and everlasting life (John 12:24, 1 John 3:16, Galatians 6:2, Proverbs 12:10, Psalm 36:6, Luke 3:6, Job 12:10, Hosea 2:18, Genesis 9:9-10, Jeremiah 32:27). All flesh (all flesh: 1 Corinthians 15:39) is invited to develop and cherish a personal and intelligent relationship with the Creator (whether directly or via interceding shepherds or even their interceding dogs), each according to their abilities and nature, but there is no such thing as a "personal Lord and savior", or even personal salvation; there is only personal damnation and a personal lord and satan (namely one's selfish self: Matthew 4:1), and the keyword is "personal". Concern about one's own person is something that only occupies a self-centered egoist, but wouldn't cross the mind of a home-builder. A home-builder's main concern in life is to create a common home for all the creatures in their care — a home so safe and harmonic that even the Creator would want to move in.

There are people around us who are only mantel and very little shem. Those are the people that can't hear the Voice and don't care that they don't. But those of us who have a shem and who can hear the Voice that calls their shem can either grow their shem (by being effective and useful) or diminish it (by being ineffective and useless). When a person's earthly mantel dies, and their shem is the size of a grasshopper, in their next run they can only attract around them the body of a grasshopper, and they will "reincarnate" as a grasshopper. But a person whose earthly mantel is one of a lowly worker but whose shem is one of a king, will "reincarnate" as a king. This is how the whale lost its legs. It's also how the dinosaur lost its right to live on earth.

Biodiversity occurs in every ecosystem, and mental diversity occurs in every language, which means that no race, religion or nationality corresponds to any particular animal. This in turn means that merely studying some other language won't change one's mind, just like a deer that wanders from the savannah into a rain forest isn't suddenly going to become a squirrel. Instead, the deer will simply keep grazing like it always has and ultimately leave the forest when it realizes that there isn't much grass to be gotten there. The truest immigrants are those who were born in a language where they never belonged, and wander about homelessly until they find some other language with which the very core of their hearts begins to resonate from the first whispered words on.

The Jews are the "chosen people" but this chosenness relates to their mission to bring salvation to all mankind (not to get to heaven by stepping on everybody else). The entire ecosystem must always be a dynamic whole, and either the entire ecosystem survives (and brings forth great apes and then rational humans who can know God and teach righteousness to all the earthlings) or it entirely perishes. Any animal that does not respect and maintain the whole of its ecosystem (by taking or killing more than it needs or growing too big or numerous) will either kill its own ecosystem or be erased by the unbalance it has created (because wastes pile up, resources run out, viruses emerge, and so on).

Theology is not the study of God because God cannot be observed and thus studied. Instead, theology is the study of everything and specifically the Oneness of All Things (which is the same Oneness that defines God). Theology is an umbrella term for the unity of all the sciences, just like "humanity" is an umbrella term for all the domesticated animals (i.e. a wooly sheep is as human as any song by Rihanna). Theology is the study that unifies not only all human understanding but all understanding. Theology is the umbrella term for the unification of all forms of consciousness, from that of the tiniest microbes to that of entire human collectives, including consciousness that might arise in complex synthetic systems.

The "new heaven and new earth" that the Bible speaks of (Isaiah 65:17, Revelation 21:1) refers to the sequential realms of the giant triple fractal: before there was life, creation was entirely matter. Life began as a new creation within the old one, self-similar to it (a simulation, if you will). Likewise, mind came as a new creation in life, self-similar to it. Like blockchain, mind is the network-layer that sits on top of the biological protocol-layer that sits on top of the material settlement-layer. God promises that each layer or realm will be perfected over time (time has to do with information stored in particle interactions, so time in the material world is not the same thing as time in the bio- or mental worlds) so that a "new" one may emerge within the "old" one like a baby emerges within her mother. The re-birth that Jesus talks about in John 3:3 is precisely that: not a double doing of something that's been done before but rather a perfection of one's old life so that a whole new or next one may emerge like soul did in matter and mind did in soul. All this also means that the Bible predicts a fourth realm, to emerge within the realm of consciousness, something so utterly new that mere consciousness cannot know it (with its nucleus described in Revelation 21).

We humans think in words and our celebrated consciousness is an island of words that sits atop a much larger ocean of pre-verbal "quantum foam". In the womb, the minds of the unborn polarize upon the sounds from outside, and newborns swim heartily in that pre-verbal ocean, and know of no alternative, until their parents coach them onto the glittering beach of their first words. We moderns have the luxury of a fully formed language island, rich with lush vegetation, ready for us to explore and make our home in. And while our physical bodies make the age old journey from single cellular lifeform to an aquatic existence to that of a tetrapod (when we're toddlers) and finally bipedal locomotion, our new-born minds likewise crawl on the land of language like the lung-fish of old, that adapt and evolve into a wide array of reptiles, birds and mammals.

Some of us take to the trees and leap from branch to branch or stare out over the world from a swaying throne. Others prefer to dig holes in the earth and sit safely in them. Others fly on wings high above most everything or perch on any available branch or rocky outcrop. Some rediscover the sea they once emerged from and return there, only to occasionally mount the beach like seals. Some become dolphins or even whales and make their adult existence permanently in the ocean. There is no better or worse: all life works together to sustain the entire biosphere. But imagine the things we landlubbers could learn from the aquatics if only we could learn their language and pick their brains.

The island that the parents coach the child onto corresponds to the language that the parents speak. The kind of person the child can become depends on the variety available within that language basin. But most ecosystems support most major animal groups — from tropical jungles to frozen tundras: rodents are everywhere, and so are birds and ruminants and carnivorous predators — and so most languages support most mind-forms. But only jungles gave rise to great apes, just like salvation is from the Hebrew speakers (John 4:22). And every ecosystem sports a broad array of vegetation that supports its animals.

The biosphere comprises two main branches: animals and plants (atop a vast spectrum of single-cellular creatures and simple multi-cellular organisms that are neither plant nor animal), and these two evolved together, like the lyrics and melody of a song. Or in other words: there are no great apes without great trees, and no grazers without grass. Likewise, mankind's conscious identities (which are narratives) evolved alongside the words that rose organically in the landscape of the language. Words store information the way plant cells store light.

Words are the names of things (ονομα, onoma, means both name and noun), and when we physically walk through our environment, our brain makes an imaginary map from the names of the things we see. A hundred people in a room are hard to track when they are strangers, but a party of a hundred of our familiar friends is assessed with a single glance and easily navigated and to a very useful extend predicted. When we walk through a forest and we only know the word "tree", the forest becomes an unyielding and menacing wall of green. But when we know the specific names (and thus the natures and relationships) of a hundred trees, any forest becomes a familiar place and at once we see its regions and even its history and organization.

When we talk or read, our mind grazes. The familiar Latin word for tooth, namely dens (hence dentist) is identical to the Proto-Indo-European root dens-, meaning to learn (hence the verb διδασκω, didasko, to teach). The Hebrew word for tooth, likewise, is שן (shen), from the verb שנן (shanan) to sharpen or to learn (to produce a sharp mind), and relates to the verbs ישן (yashen), to sleep, שנה (shana), to change or to repeat.

The purpose of a word is not to convey information but to facilitate imagination, even involuntarily imagination per mental reflex: to dream. The purpose of a word is to force the brain into forming a corresponding picture for us to look at. Our brains are not wired to glean hard data from every word we absorb, but rather to convert words into the pixels that form or augment or alter the much bigger picture of the ever plastic reality model within our minds: the model in which we ourselves exist and from which we ourselves derive our identity. Our consciousness does not create a linear timeline from events stitched together in the order in which they occur, or a library of books with reports-on-reality neatly stacked, but rather a small set of algorithms that explains (even creates) the reality around us and which in turn is confirmed with every fulfilled prediction (there's what I call a "strawberry": all strawberries are sweet, so when I bite this, I will taste sweetness. It's sweet! What a nice strawberry).

In most modern languages (like English), the etymology of words is not so important and rarely emphasized. In such languages, words are just like the proper names of our friends (Bob, Alice, Thing One, Thing Two), whose names don't explain anything about the person. But in some ancient languages (like Biblical Hebrew), a word's etymology is hugely important and much of the meaning of the word is stored in its natural relationship to other words. In Biblical Hebrew, almost every word comes with a group (called a root) of siblings that look similar and mean similar things and so help explain the first word. A larger group of first cousins explains the siblings, and an even larger group of second cousins explain the first, until finally the entire scope of the Hebrew language is evoked by any one of its words.

In English, two words side-by-side merely form a small sentence. In Hebrew, however, two words side-by-side are like a marriage couple at their wedding, whose two extended families also show up and create an enormous economy of conversation and business in the background. The Hebrew Bible has an explicit narrative layer (that's the wedding-couple layer; the one that gets translated into English) and an enormous implicit universe created by every word's many siblings and cousins (which an English translation cannot possibly convey or even hint at). And even the wedding-couple layer is vastly more complex in Hebrew than in English. A Hebrew text is full of verbatim quotes and paraphrased references, and strewn with the old-world equivalents of hyperlinks, because every word, name or phrase is linked like a neuron to every occurrence of that same word or term anywhere else in the text (for instance Matthew 27:46 hyperlinks to the whole of Psalm 22, John 1:27 hyperlinks to Ruth 4:7, John 18:10 hyperlinks to Exodus 21:6; and so on — pretty much every word of the Bible links to every other in some way, like a big brain made of words instead of neurons). And that is why English is mostly grass, whereas Hebrew is mostly tree. Hebrew is a glass tree, just like the universe, just like consciousness.

The Hebrew language stems from a time when there were no dictionaries and grammar books and such, and the features of the language were simply demonstrated by the story told. The creation story of Genesis One is not only the most brilliant piece of complexity theory ever produced (it describes the basic stages through which any evolving system must evolve), it's obviously also a language lesson, which patiently lists the numbers one through seven and the most fundamental concepts, objects and processes of observable reality. Genesis One is a nursery rhyme, and is designed to boot consciousness. Everything follows from it.

(Jesus came to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17-19). The Law was issued by God. God claimed the right to issue Law and demand that people followed it by claiming to have created reality in six days (Exodus 20:11). That means that God's Law does not consist of random demands by some tyrant but rather describe the algorithms of nature by someone who knows how it all works. That in turn means that if reality shows no trace of having indeed been created in six days, God had no right to issue law and no grounds to expect that people would willingly obey. It also means that Jesus' death and resurrection may have been spectacular but without any further significance. Very few Christians take this seriously, which in turn demonstrates Christianity's innate inability to sniff beyond any surface.)

All this also means that the Bible and the Hebrew language literally are the same thing; a thing of which every feature is connected to every other, just like every leaf of a tree is connected to every other leaf, no matter how many branches away. The trunk of the tree that is the Hebrew language (and thus the Bible) is, of course, the Torah — which itself is an expansion of the seminal Ten Commandments, whose two sets of five are summarized by the Big Two (Matthew 22:36-40), which in turn can be compressed into One, the very seed of the Torah and the whole of created reality and the most basic summary of the Logos: "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you" (Matthew 7:12).

Since that one seed becomes a Torah-tree in every Hebrew-speaking mind (from mice to moose and from aardvarks to apes), a gathering of Hebrew speakers becomes a vast forests of genetically identical trees that are linked by a subterranean network of ancient mycelium, and in which an inquisitive Hebrew squirrel can merrily jump upon someone else's Torah's branches. In early Biblical times, all language was arboreal; there was no grass yet.

People like to believe that symbols came long after the spoken word and that the oral tradition came before the written word but that's not so. The symbol always comes first and speech synchronizes around it. From the rise of the very first symbols (see The First Signs by Genevieve von Petzinger), folks would go around preaching the symbols' pronunciations and meaning (Knut was here! This club is Bobby's! Powwow next moon at Great Oaks!). Stories are told from ever evolving symbols and the symbols become better at capturing the stories, but while the two evolve hand in hand, the symbols lead and speech follows. English is the kind of language that sits on many waters but has forgotten that she once had a husband who had found her in the wilderness and formed her according to his perfect designs.

Animals and plants relate in four main ways: (1) we breathe their air, (2) we eat their leaves, (3) we shelter in their shade, and (4) we make tools out of their branches.

When we walk through our city — and our brain is busy attaching words to things and making maps from the words — we see things consciously (hey look, an ice-cream cart) and subconsciously (everything but the ice-cream cart). It's amazing what we fail to notice (the invisible gorilla experiment comes to mind), but it's equally astonishing what we do notice, albeit subconsciously. When we walk or drive, most of our actions stem from reflexes, which are involuntary reactions to data unconsciously absorbed. Such undeliberate data intake is breathed in, whereas information we deliberately focus on (the ice-cream cart), we eat. The information breathed in is positively enormous, suggesting that the island of consciousness is a tiny blip compared to the oceans of our subconscious — which we nevertheless have access to, once we figure out how to do that (the Bible's words for wind or breath are the same as those for spirit: רוח, ruah, and πνευμα, pneuma).

In the bio-world, body mass roughly equals power and thus security. In our consciousness parallel, body weight roughly equals retained information and thus security (which explains the Bible's often evoked parallel between physical wealth and wisdom). Since the information that all of us retain in our minds is riddled with nonsense and folly, our future selves will be much smaller but much cleaner (Numbers 13:33, Proverbs 6:6). Most of the knowledge we need to function will be stored in the collective (namely in the language that the collective collectively speaks), rather than in our own big private heads.

A brontosaur who sees another brontosaur standing next to him, but doesn't know a great deal about his neighbor, sees in fact a rather small brontosaur or one very far away. An ape who sees fifty of his neighbors and can tell them all apart by face, voice, character and talents, can count on their loyalty and can pick their brain through communication, has access to a great deal more knowledge than any single ape, no matter how smart. Such an ape, such a socially connected ape, is thus a great deal "heavier" than that single ape-wizard (and this very much in a general-relativity sort of way; the phenomena of the Wisdom Of Crowds and Smart Swarms are also related to this).

An elephant absorbs, processes and secretes vast amounts of plants, and retains about half of their energy. The other half of consumed plants pass through the elephant undigested and flops back out along with its fertilizing dung. Without the vast heaps of dung that grazing herds leave behind on their trek, there would not be a next generation of grass and plants.

Poop isn't something we produce, but rather what's left of what we absorbed when we've extracted all the good stuff, in a "take the package, wear the shoes, toss the box" sort of way. The noted thinker Forrest Gump understood that life is like a box of chocolates, and that the sh-t that happens is simply the empty box we throw out. Wisdom, likewise, turns useful science into technology and leaves whatever is left to whoever wants it. We eat plants and what we can use we turn into the whole gamut of our broadcast to the world: all our sounds, smells and movements. What we can't use and still ate, we drop behind us and ignore.

A squirrel is much lighter than an elephant but adds to its private weight the borrowed weight of the tree. That makes the living tree the first of the tools, and a careless observer will not see the difference between a squirrel hiding in the tree or wielding it like a cherub would his flaming sword. And so, not rarely, even an elephant finds itself forced to go out of its way around a tree with the squirrel in it.

An elephant must always find its own way and stand unshielded against the wind and rain and sunshine. A squirrel can always find a secluded spot in the tree to hide from whatever wind is blowing. Again: there is no right or wrong, each simply play their part. But some animals invest in ways that are unforgivably dead ends, while others invest in ways that become highways and then yellow brick roads to Paradise.

The first tools were sticks and branches (apes, elephants, birds all use sticks), and a proper tool is a branch that was severed from its natural context, and purposefully saved for general use. In language-land, a stone tool would correspond to a wordless snarl, but a tool made from a living plant is what we would call a proverb or saying or even a phrasal verb: "to go boldly", "to wait around", "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree", "so far so good", "better safe than sorry", "what say you?", "Hi there!", "good morning". Such verbal tools occurred originally in organic conversation but proved so useful that they were kept in the language's permanent toolbox, to be utilized whenever the speaker thought they might be handy. Some were plain utilitarian (for instance a complex procedure remembered in a song), some were weapons (bad words and curses are only bad words and curses when the recipient also thinks so) and some were designed to store information such as a tribe's history of perhaps the route to winter grounds. Mankind's great foundational texts, such as the Torah and the Iliad, are of that latter category (which is why the Bible is compared to a μαχαιρα, macharia, a sharp utility tool).

Although the arsenal of mankind's clever sayings grew gradually, for many eons the sophistication of verbal tools remained at that earliest neolithic level, although people gradually perfected the weaving of verbal tapestries and the baking of verbal pottery. The waxing art of weaving required ever more complicated mechanisms and the baking of pottery required ever more control over the beastly fires. A quantum leap forward in verbal tool making happened in the 16th century, when mathematical notation was invented, which ushered in the mental bronze age. Metal toolery took flight in the 20st century, at the start of the computer age, when coders began to compile libraries of versatile functions and methods or multi-purpose scripts and snippets.

The first real tools were spears and clubs, which, we may assume, were predominantly wielded by hunting and warring men. But the desire for pots and cloth is rather domestic and quite likely pursued by women. Rather fittingly, the first software coder was the poet Byron's daughter, Ada Byron Lovelace (1815-1852), who could do what the computer's male builder, Charles Babbage (1791-1871), could not. And when in the 1940 and 50s, the first large main frames had to be endowed with algorithms, the industry reverted to stay-at-home moms (lovingly dubbed the "pregnant programmers"; quotes from Clive Thompson's Coders, 2019), who were not only skilled at "knitting and weaving" and "cooking from a cook book" but also multi-tasking and managing complex systems such as family homes.

But the pregnant programmers didn't really write code but essentially ran physical wires between vacuum tubes. In 1959, "almost nobody had experience in computer programming": there was no foundation to build on, nothing to grow roots into and draw sustenance from. That is until the legendary Mary Allen Wilkes, a philosophy and theology student with a specialty in symbolic logic, took her Boolean wisdom to the coding floor and instantly changed the stagnant waters into a velvety wine with a very long history of natural fermentation.

The first rule of technology is that if you have to guess, you will guess wrong. Certainty, no matter how long it takes to get there, is the only rock upon which to build. Coders, like theologians worth their salt and all other sorts of technician, never guess but very precisely define their variables and general functions, and proceed to weave (Psalm 139:13) a code that always does the same thing without the slightest margin (which is not to say that all code is right away perfect; debugging is part of the creative process). Coders don't debate or speculate, but weave watertight baskets for anyone to safely store whatever in — for more on baskets, see our article on the verb σπειρω (speiro), to sow or scatter, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew verb that appears to have given rise to the name Nazareth. The strange handbags that the Anunnaki carry are seed bags, for storing and dispensing algorithmic seeds that become words first and law later.

The Proto-Indo-European root tek- means to weave. From that root come our English words technology, textile and text, which in turn demonstrates that script, from the first signs on, has always been recognized as a technology. The early Hebrews revered language, and particularly the self-organizing aspect of language, as divine — on the obvious premise that God is One, and thus anything that unifies is divine. The tabernacle was a device in which God met man; a synthetic continuation of the more naturally (or rather: spontaneously) occurring burning bush, from which God first spoke to Moses. The word for bush, סנה (seneh), corresponds to Sinai, where the Law was issued, and lawfulness is precisely the premise upon which all technology is based, namely natural or synthetic rules globally applied toward a perfectly predictable outcome.

The Biblical term lawfulness (and by extension righteousness and eleutheria) has nothing to do with slavish compliance with regulation, nothing with obedience, nothing with legality or law-enforcement. The term lawfulness means "operating by rules", regardless of whether those rules are fair or not, or even if they work or not. Lawfulness means operating by rules, and thus being consistent and thus being consistently predictable (to anyone who knows the rules). The exchange and even very existence of information depends on lawfulness. Lawfulness means predictability, and thus trustworthiness. Trust and dependability stem from operating by rules and never allowing for exceptions (which are events that happen for no reason).

The corresponding term lawlessness, likewise, has nothing to do with breaking laws, with being disobedient or illegal, but means "operating without rules", and thus being inconsistent and inconsistently unpredictable (meaning that an observer cannot even be 100% sure that some outcome could not have been predicted: a liar even lies about lying).

Human emotions are the same as animal emotions, and both are wholly physical, wholly private and entirely unpredictable; like water, life-giving but unsuited to stand on. All language and all technology and thus all civil society are lawful: dry land to stand on. Civil society collapses when lawfulness collapses and people begin to cherish their private feelings over rational discourse. This too is a natural law (Nahum 2:6).

Wisdom, like forging and maintaining social bonds, is difficult. Staying alone is easy. Ignorance is easy. Hate is easy. Emptiness is always much easier than fullness. It takes no effort at all. Love is hard. Lawfulness takes practice. Wisdom takes effort.

Wisdom is never private and always communal, never emotive and always rational, never lawless and aways lawful: always technological and always mechanical. Wisdom has nothing to do with serene passivity, and everything with active production. Wisdom builds machines that don't kill, pollute or fail or do different things in different moods. Wisdom builds tools, ovens, roads, farms, cities, schools and hospitals: civilized societies for everyone to always count on (Luke 7:35). The first coders were not students of creative speculation but of systematic logic, of verifiably consistent Boolean reasoning. Fantasy, speculative philosophy and ultimately the metaverse are not wisdom. They don't demonstrate or even reflect the great consistent Oneness of the universe, and thus monotheism, and thus God, and are nothing but elaborate clouds of incoherent dust. This not only means that speculative philosophy cannot find God, it also means that God cannot be found in it. Most urgently for humanity today: God cannot be found in the metaverse, which means that the metaverse is the only "place" in the universe "where God is not", as the old Protestants phrased it.

Speculative philosophy and polytheistic gobbledygook is entertaining, perhaps, which suggests that it belongs in the theatre, to be proclaimed by actors in costumes, who get paid salaries by the owners of the theatre for reciting verse that someone else has written. Certainly not all entertainment is detrimental (Titus 1:15), but without the anchor of monotheism, the audience is doomed to dissipate. Below we'll talk about euthanizing the herds, which is an utterly unpleasant topic, also because the herds will voluntarily enter the slaughterhouse, to willingly squander the precious human life that they've been given. They will not be restored. Their entire kind will be relegated to oblivion, their single talent handed to the eternals.

The tabernacle, to the contrary, was built by engineers whose technological inspiration came from the Holy Spirit (Exodus 31:1-11) and whose function was to forge the devices that would bring people together and unite them with God. Israel was organized upon the tabernacle, which contained the nuclei Ark with the Law on two stone tablets — which in turn was an extrapolation of Jacob's ladder, and a ladder is a technological marvel that lets a person get higher than their biological qualities would allow. This tabernacle complex was obviously self-similar to a single living prokaryotic cell. The portable tabernacle became Solomon's fixed temple, the so-called First Temple, which was like a huge synthetic single-cellular eukaryote. The First Temple was superseded by the Second temple, whose Judaism sported a novel soap bubble structure of synagogues and wisdom schools, kept synchronous by a freshly invented formal postal service — this obviously according to the design of a multi-cellular organism (hence also the Ethiopian tradition of multiple Arks).

The first of the multi-cellular creatures were little more than exceptionally efficiently functioning colonies, but at some point, they managed to synthesize and isolate their own blood and the colony began to be a single living being: a mind. Jesus equated his body with this Second Temple. His earthly profession was that of τεκτων (tekton), assembler (not "carpenter"), from the same PIE root tek-, to weave, from which English has the words textile, text and technology.

Cain was a crop farmer whereas Abel was a herdsman, and the two could not be more different. A herdsman makes use of the sheep's natural inclination to voluntarily follow a native leader, and the worth of the leader is established by the grassy pastures and quiet waters that the herd stumbles upon simply by freely following their chosen one (Zechariah 8:23). A crop farmer, to the contrary, opposes the natural chaos of fields. He uproots trees and shrubs and ploughs the field and erases its natural memory. Then he opposes natural diversity by sowing only one sort of seed and fighting off both native and foreign seeds that hide deep in the desecrated soil or blow in on the wind from abroad. He fights off birds looking for a meal. He builds fences to keep his neighbors from helping themselves to his harvest. He erects a military and a police force, and writes his sense of property rights into global legislation. He elects a king to enforce the law and creates a commercial world based on competition. In order to pay for this immense apparatus, he creates famine and scarcity that drive prices up, so that ultimately people sell their souls for food (1 Samuel 8:10-18).

Cain killed Abel and was expelled, and Seth seems to have inherited the best (and worst) of both his unfortunate brothers. The Abel-component of complex agriculture contracted the help of the domesticated dog, whereas the Cain-side of things enlisted the help of the domesticated cat. Dogs didn't really understand what was going on but were nevertheless invested in the payload and focused on the sheep and (highly virtuously) learned to control their predatorial nature and not bite the master's sheep. Cats also didn't really understand what was going on, but were not focused on the payload (the crops) but focused on mice, the petty thieves and underminers, and (highly viciously) learned how to hunt and kill for sport and keep it up even when they were not hungry.

People like to believe that only Noah and company survived the flood, but the final generation in the line of Cain (Jabal, Jubal and Tubal-cain) produced music, tent-living, animal husbandry and metal working: all core elements of the Temple service (meaning that Seth is a player in Cain's game-world — in the world but not of the world). Noah's ship was a technological marvel, but so was the Tower of Babel. Moses' tabernacle was a technological marvel, but so were the cities of Pithom and Rameses (Exodus 1:11). The Bible is a technological masterpiece realized by vast clouds of gregarious players, but so is the Oasis in Ready Player One (which in turn is the close digital equivalent of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory: "if you want to view Paradise, simply look around and view it", Matthew 11:4, Luke 23:43).

On planet Consciousness, the central sun is the Logos, and light is the information that plants (words) store as meaningful knowledge. The water that is perpetually locked in the hydrological cycle, from the oceans to the clouds, rain, rivers and back to the ocean a tiny touch saltier, closely relates to information (and Singing In The Rain is not about singing in the rain). As we explain in our article on Relativity Theory, water and light are much more alike than different. And in our article on the noun αιμα (aima), blood, we explain that an organism begins to be its own thing when it isolates a swig of the world's hydrological cycle and retains it and makes it its own private blood, locked in its own private cycle.

Words and thus our celebrated human ratio are technological. Pure information is like fire and trying to handle it without protective technology results in destruction and death (confusion and insanity: the disintegration of the consistency of the mind). Instead, the light must first be transformed into an energetic compound (plants, words), then eaten or turned into tools. All animals eat but not all animals can produce or even handle tools. Some animals can be handled by tools (a dog by its leash, a horse by its reigns, cows kept in their pens by fences, humans by social codes and formal legislation) but some cannot. Zebras, most famously, stubbornly refuse to be domesticated. Bears (essentially big dogs), likewise could not be counted on. To the frustration of human hopefuls, these creatures retained their lawlessness and refused lawfulness.

Contrary to popular belief, domesticated animals were never domesticated by force but always by friendship. The proverbial friendship between humans and dogs probably arose out of a symbiotic relationship from which both benefitted. The herds, likewise, learned that the presence of humans and their dogs kept natural predators at bay. When there were shepherds, there was always food and shelter, the young were protected, the wounded tended and the stray retrieved.

Altogether, the presence of shepherds greatly reduced the stress of living, and turned the wilderness into a well-ordered Paradise. About a dozen wild species simply volunteered for captivity on the human farm, because living off the protection of incomprehensible forces greatly appeals to any creature that is too cowardly and too lazy to figure out how to live autonomously in well-earned freedom and by the dignifying grace of the Creator who gives to every living thing what they require (Psalm 23:1, Job 38:41, Jeremiah 29:11, Matthew 6:31, Philippians 4:19).

If the rise of code in the mental sphere corresponds to the rise of metal in the biosphere, then our human world today is organized closely similar to how the biosphere was organized right around the year 1177 BCE, lovingly known as the Year Civilization Collapsed. Fortunately for everyone, we now know what the dealio is, what certainly must happen, how to prep for that and how to prevent too much damage and collateral drama.

A dog from China has no trouble understanding a dog from Peru, because the verbal and gestural expressions of both these dogs are as natural to them as any part of their bodies. In fact, a dog's barking is physical, and thus entirely reflective of bodily and thus emotional goings on. It's not often enough emphasized what a very complicated things modern human languages are, and what intricate mechanisms are at work within them. Modern languages certainly did not dawn fully formed upon the minds of early humans but grew like stalagmites of mental crystals in the depths of very large communities.

In the 1960s, Paul Ekman showed that a wide range of human facial expressions, from joy to disgust, are identical all over the world, regardless of culture or technological sophistication. Even blind babies pull the same faces. And that suggests that mankind once communicated via a proto-language that was entirely natural, emotional and physical, and thus the same all over the world. Before humans had begun to develop the miracle of their synthetic languages, they were endowed with a natural animal language (as mentioned above, essentially a dialect of Groot: see Genesis 11:1), and anyone could converse more or less intelligently (albeit emotionally) with anyone else anywhere in the world. These early humans were physically identical to us moderns, and this language was doubtlessly much more complex than the natural language of dogs, or even that of elephants and whales.

As authors like Graham Hancock continue to declare, an ever growing body of evidence strongly suggests that prior to our modern history there was a time when the whole of humanity formed a kind of natural republic, complete with global travel and trading routes that resembled those of migratory birds, and marvelous hubs of civilization that arose out of sheer neighborly love rather than central government. Even without modern speech, these early humans intuited dazzling levels of physics, cosmology and even mathematics. It's been suggested that the pyramids of Giza stem from that time, also because of the notable absence of any kind of artistic expression or decorative elements: they were built the way ants built an ant-hill, without plan or directive, but simply out of the sheer liberty of acting like an ant (Proverbs 6:6).

This magnificent global Groot-language based civilization (Atlantean, if you will; certainly not to subscribe to any modern mythology but just to give it a familiar name) came to an end when peoples began to specialize, and their art and thus pottery and weaving began to be ever more personal and specific. They began to forge words and smith tools, and while their information technology expanded, its global consistency shattered, as is told in the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). Local languages and cultures arose, and many millennia would pass before these began to cross their own borders and discover the others. Here's the fractal:

This is not the only pattern visible in the timeline. An obvious reversal pattern has Christ as its hinge point and progresses symmetrically into past and future, peaking every five centuries or so: at 0.5k before and after Christ the Torah and Quran are written. At 1k, Jerusalem is the focus of David BC and the crusaders AD. At 1.5k, Moses' revolutionary legislation BC corresponds to the Renaissance AD. At 2k, Abraham's family BC corresponds to the Stand Model of particles AD (Genesis 13:16). At 2.5k, Shem was born before the flood and lived to see Esau marry, which means that in the 20th century, the dominance of sequential causality begins to weaken and people begin to experience premonitions as clear as memories of the End of the World.

As Eric H. Cline explained, when the bronze age palatial estates collapsed, the administrative servant class had networks in place that the illiterate masters had no idea about. Earthquakes and famine ended the old world and the old palatial master class simply evaporated while their servile administrators became the new master class of the iron age cities.

Note that the formation of human cities was a completely different event relative to the entire biosphere (a minor innovation that most animals barely noticed) than only to the human mental sphere (which changed the whole of humanity). Likewise, the string of inventions from the first signs to the alphabet was probably ignored by most humans alive at the time, and was only an obsession to a very small minority of visionaries.

Also note that the great innovation of coin money was, beside the greatly welcomed standardization of the unit of property, the massive means of propaganda that the surface of the coins made possible. The great innovation of BTC is, beside the most welcomed distributed ledger, the Ordinals that can be programmed into every Satoshi (hence too the popularity of the various 2nd and 3rd generation blockchain protocols), which allows for a vibrant and transparent economic ecosystem to develop upon the bedrock of the financial settlement layer, like human speech that developed upon the bedrock of animal Groot.

Over the last few decades, several models have been proposed of a kind of periodic table of personality types, but like once the Minoan systems of Linear A and B and the Cypriot syllabary, none of them work well enough to warrant wide adoption. Here at Abarim Publications we suspect that the winning system will explain the human mind as a kind of molecule or solar system, a harmonic whole in a Fourier sort of way, of which the handful partaking elements are spectrums on which the person can be a Frodo (child-like, hydrogen and such), a Strider (normal, carbon and oxygen and such) or a Gandalf (unusually advanced, iron). Physically, there are midgets and giants, relative to the common norm. Socially, there are autists (Frodo) and charismatics (Gandalf), relative to the common neurotypicals (Strider). Mozart was a musical Gandalf (who at six played like a normal thirty year old, and at thirty like a six-hundred year old), but a Frodo at marketing. Tesla was a technological Gandalf but a Frodo at mythology. Elon Musk is a Gandalf at money but a Frodo at compassion. In the modern gender debate, there is probably a lot of Bildersturm going on, but some non-binaries may actually be sexual Gandalfs, whereas some cross-dressers may actually be sexual Frodos (and wannabe children rather than wannabe women). And while the mental atoms of most people are solitary Striders across the board, any Frodo will always attract a compensating Gandalf and any Gandalf will always seek an endearing Frodo. Still, as long as we can only guess, we can only guess wrong.

Our present human world, our technological world of language and rationality, is rapidly becoming a global urban-agricultural complex, with a stellar smattering of cities, surrounded by great farms interspersed with vast but quickly receding ranges of wilderness. Wildlings of all plumage continue to drift in. Some look for shelter or an easy meal, but have no idea what it is they stumbled upon and submit themselves to. Others recognize the central building — the farm house, for the vast majority of wild and domesticated animals a mere inconsequential blip in the wide world — and intuitively understand its nature and purpose, simply because even though they grew up in the wilderness, they have always been as human as the shepherds.

In the largely invisible care of the shepherds and their ever present dogs, massive herds are getting used to life in stables, pastures or on the open range in semi-captivity. Dinosaurs and mammoths have long died out. Elephants were once essential in building the great cities, and while wild ones still wander the great plains, most domesticated ones have been retired. Apart from the ubiquitous birds and occasional marsupial, platypus, mole and shrew, the mental sphere is largely peopled by two major groups of animals: flat-footers and toe-walkers:

The movie Forrest Gump is wholly outstanding, also because the hero of the story is obviously not the fittest in a survival sort of way; just the fastest. As proposed earlier: the distribution of mind-forms is self-similar to the distribution of life-forms in the biosphere. All humans develop both physically and mentally from single cellular zygote to maturity, and while our bodies can only become great ape (upon emerging from the "waters" when we are born), so our minds can become any animal that walks the dry land of reason, upon emerging like the lung fish of old upon the starry beach of words.

When our little lung fish first abandoned the sea in which she was born and crawled upon the strange starry beach of reason, she didn't do so because she was pursuing exiting prospects. No sane Abraham leaves his Ur out of a search for adventure, because the fittest survivors do their best to stay in the environment in which they are so very fit, and thus only get fitter. Like Abraham and Forrest, our little lung fish was a Third Tribe nerd on the run from rock-throwing alpha-serving bullies.

In the ancient biosphere, those bullies were huge mollusks (squid) and arthropods (lobsters). To Abraham, they were the tower-building Chaldeans (bricks-stackers rather than rock-throwers) and the Second Tribe was wife-swiping Egypt. In the mental sphere, the bullies were the Atlanteans, who, despite their enlightenment, had become tyrants who glorified their pre-speech Groot language and outlawed the perversion of eloquence in all its binding guises (hence, as proposed before, perhaps the absence of artistic marks on the pyramids). Much later, the Hebrews would invent the alphabet, but first had to escape Egypt, where they were forced to bake bricks, and where a priestly elite fiercely protected their cumbersome system of thousands of different hieroglyphs.

Most of the hunted colleagues of our little lung fish invested in speed and numbers, developed sleek piscine bodies and congregated in massive schools. Our lung fish ancestor, however, did something nobody had ever thought to do before. To a fish, no matter how slow, throwing yourself on land was nothing short of utter madness. Those left behind surely mourned the lung fish' foolish move and taught their children to not be like that. But they couldn't see, or even begin to imagine, that outside their field of vision, beyond their wildest imagination or the very world of their entire reality — indeed, in some unimaginable heavenly world of mystical dryness far above and beyond the water, our lung fish not only survived but diversified and soon occupied every inch of terrain. Some distant descendants of the crazy little lung fish even returned to the waters and quickly began to dominate life there.

If our little lung fish was among the very first to land, and the beach was entirely empty and nobody was around to show the way, she could choose between going all in (or out, in this case) and a prudently frugal half-in-half-out-see-where-this-goes kind of approach. The vast majority chose to prudently go half-in. These became the amphibians: frogs and such, who would never stray far from water, whose skin had to stay moist and whose eggs had to always be laid in the water, like those of fish. But there's only so much one can achieve from a puddle, and the amphibians quickly hit an evolutionary ceiling. A tiny minority of lung-fish pioneers, however, wholly embraced the new paradigm (quite probably because they were shoved off by their burly amphibian brethren who occupied all the good puddles) and stepped resolutely on dry land. These became the reptiliomorphs that would inherit the earth.

The reptiliomorphs, who stormed the beach and kept going, again had a choice: shall I lay many eggs, lay them on the ground and let my abundant offspring fend for themselves, while I go off eating until I am the biggest and I don't have to mind anybody at all? Or shall I have less offspring but carry them alive within my own body, and nurse them with my own fluids after they are born (the word mammal comes from mammary, which is why our present mammal dominated world is in some stories lovingly referred to as Boob World), and raise and educate them, while I invest in neighborly relations with other equally vulnerable mothers? When the land was still empty, the vast majority of reptiliomorphs chose individual strength over society, and a strength-in-numbers slosh of abandoned eggs over one cherished baby. These became the reptiles, the giants of old who dominated the planet for millions of years.

The mammals became a tiny and oppressed minority. They developed warm blood, which cost a lot of energy but increased their otherness relative to the world at large and also defeated many fungi and pathogens. They were hot-headed weirdoes but healthier and had to work for that, and were thus much more dynamic, and met more and exchanged more than their massive but cold-blooded overlords.

Any alien and not too well-informed observer of the earthly biosphere at that time might have believed that the bulky brontosaur or the mighty T-rex (like the great lobsters before) embodied the pinnacle of life, the biological spear-point (in a Titanomachy sort of way) whom evolution would continue to perfect within the environment in which they were so very fit, until their distant offspring could unite with the Creator. It was not to be, and the mighty reptiles bit the dust — they were on the decline long before the comet hit simply because the ever-unified biosphere would no longer support them. Crocodiles, turtles and snakes are the last of the true reptiles: cold blooded and viciously anti-social (they only stick together to steal heat from each other).

A very small and needy reptilian remnant, however, relented from the strategic choices their cold and antisocial ancestors had made. They too developed warm blood and embraced otherness. They built nests for their eggs and kept them close to their own bodies, and continued to care for their young after they emerged from their little stony cells. Most spectacularly, they stopped leaning on their front limbs and began to use them as shields, not for themselves but to cover their young from the elements and leering predators. To everybody's surprise, after eons of evolution favoring wider and more protective shields, these creatures discovered that they could fly with them.

(The wife of Moses was Zipporah, which means Bird. She was one of seven daughters of Jethro, which means Remnant. The Hebrew word for Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, namely כימה, kima, formally relates to כון, kun, to be firm or fixed, but clearly plays with the verb כמה, kama, to thirst; i.e. to desire water or light or wisdom.)

The warm-blooded mammals, meanwhile, had a choice: shall I run toward what I like and away from what I don't? Or shall I only always run toward whatever peaks my interest (ally or enemy, lovely or horrible, comforting or frightening, familiar or alien) and stand my ground? Adherers to the first option invented polytheism, which is a lifestyle governed by a bi-polar obsession, the arc between fear and greed, and selection and competition. Polytheism in all its many guises is most fundamentally signified by a difference in reaction to what is desired and what is rejected, or between "good" and "evil". It thus also invents the coward, which is someone who is entirely at ease with the dictum that one should always run away from one's enemies, rather than toward them.

A hero, to the contrary, is someone who finds obvious normalcy in always running toward one's enemies — obviously not in some insane suicidal charge, but in a calculated approach, while studying the enemy and learning from him, figuring out his methods so as to develop counter moves, or even his needs so as to serve him in a symbiotic sense and perhaps even come to benefit from him.

Heroism is the principled rejection of evil, or rather the principled rejection of slapping the label "evil" onto anything that simply wants to live, just like any other creature that God has called into being (Genesis 33:10, Matthew 5:43-48, Luke 23:34; also see Isaiah 45:7 but in Hebrew, not English). A hero is someone who regards the world utterly irrespective of their own personal tastes: someone who refuses to eat the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil on general principle: someone who only serves One, and who subsequently also invents monotheism, which is a lifestyle centered upon a stationary nucleus and is signified by confidence and skill and cooperation (Romans 16:19, Philippians 4:8), and certainly not by rejection. Heroism is certainly not signified by a pursuit of evil or any attempt to eradicate anything from one's environment on account of it being evil (Jude 1:9).

Polytheists have different sets of rules, different rights and duties, different perks and tariffs for innies and outies, for homies and others, for bros and strangers. Monotheists have only one set of rules: one law for both native-born and resident aliens, one law for rich and poor, for wise and foolish, for strong and weak (Exodus 12:49, Proverbs 22:2, Matthew 5:45), even for God and creation. And sure enough, monotheists also have only one law for both the living and the dead, which is a very big deal to those who understand the principles of an algorithmic reality. The one-law principle of reality means that those who know the law can calculate their way into hell and there gather up any collections of loose parts than can still be assembled and brought back to the realm of the living, which is essentially the same realm (Matthew 12:28-29). Polytheists can't do that, and that's how we can tell polytheists from monotheists: monotheists can bring back the dead (Matthew 11:5).

Monotheists are certainly not scared of anything (Genesis 15:1), not even the devil, who is a mere creature and has no choice but to obey natural law like any creature, and who can be mastered and controlled like anything else.

In order to outrun any threat, anything desired or any competition, the cowardly polytheists lifted their heels and started walking on their springy toes (that's called digitigrade). They began to congregate in very large numbers to reduce the chance that they were the slowest (who gets eaten), which was essentially the same as sacrificing society's weakest members. The second group, conversely, dug their heels in the sand and waggled about on flat feet (that's called plantigrade: mice, beavers, rabbits, squirrels, apes and thus humans). The toe-walkers took to roaming about in very large cycles, whereas the flat-footers dug burrows or built lodges (or condominiums) and remained where they were. (Plantigrade actually appears to have been a late adaptation of digitigrade, meaning that the flat-footers literally were a rebellious sub-set that one day refused to run and set their heels down — as delightfully discussed in Barbie, 2023, a.k.a. Simulation Theory for Beginners. The name Barbie is short for Barbarian, a.k.a. Gentile, whose world is a simulation that is animated by a simulating society of just-as-real super-people; see our article on βαρβαρος, barbaros).

There is quite a grey zone between these two (which we will consider in more detail further below) but on average and in general, a toe-walker experiences himself (and his tastes) at the center of an immediately observable reality, whereas a flat-footer experiences the "home" at the center of her reality. The home of a flat-footer is often shared with others, which implies that a flat-footer experiences a small, secured multitude of familiars as the center of her reality. Toe-walker offer up their young and weak at the aft-end of their stampeding herds. Flat-footers keep their young and weak in their central burrows and bring them food. A toe-walker pursues happiness (i.e. their own individual elation and wonderful feelings) whereas a flat-footer pursues usefulness (servitude of the group, and its collective elation).

Social animals often look at fellows with obviously other viewpoints (positioned higher up or facing around a corner) to estimate what relevant phenomena these others might be looking at (this is an obvious precursor of Theory of Mind, which is the conscious realization that others know other things). This means that, unlike toe-walkers, flat-footers realize that their own field of vision is limited and that reality extends well beyond it and can be seen by others with other viewpoints.

And so, the flat-footers began to invest in the baffling innovation of common-home-centric mysticism, unimaginable to the self-centric what-you-see-is-what-you-get toe-walkers, which gave the flat-footers a much greater advantage than personal speed and massive numbers. Much later, God would say: "Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit" (Zechariah 4:6). Likewise, Jesus would say: "You cannot both serve Mammon [strength in numbers] and God" (Matthew 6:24).

The vast majority of mammals chose for self-centered strength in numbers and personal speed (and thus the automatic sacrifice of the weak), lifted their heel and began to walk on their toes and often (though not always) in vast herds (Psalm 41:9, John 13:18). They grew into all sorts of deer, moose, buffalo, cows, giraffes, horses, pigs, sheep, camels, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and finally whales and dolphins. All (except the whales and dolphins) ate plants. But an evil toe-walking brother decided he was above roaming about to look for greenery, and instead chomped down on the flesh of his siblings the plant eaters. This evil brother grew into a two-pronged army of devils: (1) feliforms: cats like lions, tigers, pumas, jaguars but also hyenas and mongoose, and in time the domestic cat, and (2) caniforms: wolves and foxes but also bears, seals, walruses, weasels, raccoons, and in time the domestic dog.

Predators of the mind assault a person's mental consistency, their inner network and traffic of certainty and convictions. Not by lovingly pointing out rational errors, so as to erase darkness and increase the oneness of the other's mind, but by increasing the darkness by increasing doubt and adding lies, fear, derision, ignorance, boredom and shame (Matthew 5:22, Psalm 1:1, 2 Peter 3:3). Such vile beings feed off the shards of destroyed minds and are attracted by the smell of fear (which is the smell of lawlessness). The command to not fear is the most repeated command in the Bible, and does not speak about willfully ignoring the body's highly virtuous alarm signals, but rather about organizing one's life in such a way that wild beast cannot come near (Genesis 15:1, Daniel 6:22).

A mind that is "torn apart by wild animals" is a mind whose "blood" is spilled and which has lost its monotheistic consistency (Ephesians 2:1). The physical body may go on but the mind within has become fractured like a somewhat united herd of much lesser animals, even a school of fish or a colony of single-cellular beings at the bottom of the sea, clinging to life while in the biosphere the hosting body lies comatose. People wonder why creatures of the deep look so bizarre and scary, but that's simply how beings come to look when they have no sense of a centralizing sun or light or society or communication with others: when consciousness is utterly selfish, dark and socially dead, and a quest for sustenance rises not from joy but from boredom and makes the creature a mindless serial killer by lack of any vegetation.

When a creature of the deep longs for the light that it once knew and has the wherewithal to rise toward the surface, perhaps even to make a run for the beach of reason, it may make the mistake of selfishly heading toward a single light that sits like a distant star in the darkness. Such a creature surely gets speared by night-fishers (see our article on σκανδαλον, skandalon, a night-fish-trap). A creature that not only desires the light but also desires it for its peers, will wait for the light that illuminates the entire whole world, including peers and neighbors, that floods the waters and clarifies all goings on, and clearly shows the way further up onto the shore for everyone to take.

Above we briefly touched upon the principle of Gilgul, a kind of reincarnation. The Bible hints at a sort of hydrological cycle that exists within the realm of soul and thus mind, with the salty ocean as a kind of Akashic Record (Deuteronomy 30:19, Psalm 56:8, Luke 10:20, Matthew 12:36, 2 Corinthians 5:10). Mist that evaporates from the sea, forms clouds and then rains down and forms rivers, relates to learning (the noun מורה, moreh, means both rain and teacher and derives from the same root as the familiar noun תורה, tora, meaning law; also see our article on Tigris), whereas death and sin causes a soul to slide back into the ignorance of animals and even down to the darkness and utter oblivion of single-cellular creatures near hot vents at the miles deep bottom of the ocean, where not even the mildest currents disturb the eternally stagnant mass of formlessness and hopelessness (Micah 7:19).

This image clearly corresponds with the Greek-Christian idea of hell — which suggests that wild deer literally see predators as demons, which in turn means that demons are not other-worldly spirits but as human as the rest of us (see texts like Revelation 13:18, Hebrews 13:2 and Matthew 18:10). The story of Jacob's two-way ladder (Genesis 28:12) clearly plays with these same themes, as does the story of Legion and the unfortunate herd of pigs (Mark 5:1-13). The good news, of course, is that the Logos can make a dead person whole again and bring them back to life. This in turn explains the enigmatic clause in the Apostle's creed, that Jesus "descended into hell," which is again a Greek thought and not a Hebrew one.

All this also implies that the entire arena or opera of life is a single and unified game of "four-dimensional chess" (as Luther put it), and that our present bodies are nothing but our present round's avatar. When this one dies, our score determines the form of our next avatar (1 Corinthians 15:38): if at the end of our present life our understanding of eternal righteousness adds up to that of a squirrel, a squirrel we will be in our next life, which isn't "our" life because the squirrel's identity and relation to the greater world are incomparable to "our" former human ones. And although this squirrel runs around on the same earth, made from the same atoms, it will connect the dots of reality so very much differently that it cannot possibly remember any past round (let alone any temporal and localized unrighteousness accrued during any previous rounds). Someone who reincarnates sideways (into the same species) and roughly in the same time period, may actually recognize objects and people, which would explain past life memories. Only those whose righteousness-score corresponds to a light-body (Philippians 3:21), will know the entire past.

A modern human life is as close to a heavenly existence as is biologically imaginable: when our ancestors imagined heaven, they imaged our present, technological world of abundance, health, safety, knowledge and freedom of exploration. They would not have been able to imagine that there would be people who, within all that light, would find shadow and darkness and gloom, and waste their precious human life on nonsense and synthetically generated despair.

Also not Biblical is the idea that evil somehow opposes God and came to pass by accident and because of God's poor management of Paradise. That idea depends on a bipolar world-view, which is essentially a polytheism and demonstrates a defining unfamiliarity with monotheism. The monotheistic model insists that God created everything, willfully (Isaiah 45:7), and that phenomena emerge spontaneously (autopoietically, if you please) in the biosphere because the biosphere too continues to be One, and reacts to every action with an automatic counter-action. There are no sides: there is only One, and every sin has its evil spawn — from every fear there comes an ogre, from every greed there comes a thief, from every anger there comes a killer. The only way to survive the devil, or cast him out of heaven, is to be a confident master of natural law (Romans 12:21, Ephesians 6:16), and to live not on bread alone but from all things whose existence God proclaims (Matthew 4:4).

Darkness is not the active and substantial opposite of light but the inactive and unsubstantial absence of it. But even satan obeys God's law (or else he could not communicate with created reality, and affect things). Satan is a corrective agent, who pays back sin with pain, fear with terror and weakness with oppression. His name means Opponent, but he doesn't oppose God but only sinful man (Numbers 22:32). When man aligns with God, perfection is achieved and correction is no longer relevant. Then satan has ceased to exist in the reality that man shares with God. (And in case you are wondering where satan actually really substantially goes when that happens: go sit in a dark room and after a few minutes switch on the light — now where did the darkness go?)

Note that conventions in ladies' make-up stem from biological signs that show a readiness to mate (during "estrus", certain body parts turn flashy red and females raise their tails and turn their hinds up). Likewise, with one's high-heels one signals that one is just a girl in the world, scared and in immediate need of the protection of some big daddy. The very fact that vast herds of human females gloss their lips and wear high heels in turn demonstrates that most human males are solely governed by their evolutionary wiring and stand no chance. Or as they say in the collective: resistance is futile. Should a woman elect to attract a man who has risen above his evolutionary wiring, she will show her true colors and walk in practical shoes.

Also note that the story of Job is clearly presented as a fable, with Eliphaz as the elephant, Zophar as the bird, Bildad as a herd animal, Elihu as Homo sapiens and Job as an earlier hominid. God spoke out of the "whirlwind", out of the whole wild circus, but the text implies that he may have used Elihu as mouth piece (see Job 42:7-9). Satan, obviously, is depicted as a prowling predatorial beast. Hence too Peter wrote: " ...the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8).

The Hebrew word for heel is עקב ('aqeb), from which comes the name Jacob, meaning He Will Set The Heel Down. Quite similarly, from the word for knee, namely ברך (berek), comes the verb ברך (barak), to "knee", to do the knee-thing, to kneel (i.e. to comfortably sit) which also means to be blessed, very simply because someone who is so much at ease that they can bend the knee and sit down, is blessed. The corresponding Greek word for heel, namely πτερνα (pterna), relates to the word for wing, namely πτερυξ (pterux), which in turn speaks of a protective covering rather than flying (Isaiah 31:5, Psalm 91:4). The Hebrew word for being very hairy and/or very fear-driven is שעיר (sa'ir), hence the name Seir, of the mountain of Esau, the twin brother of Jacob.

In Abraham, consciousness invented formal monotheism and global trade. In Isaac, consciousness invented humor, sport and entertainment. In Jacob and Esau, the world became divided between mystic common-home-loving introverts and self-loving field-roaming extraverts (and in her magnificent book Quiet, 2012, Susan Cain explains how despite the extravert ideal, the whole of humanity continues to be blessed by her mousy introverts).

This suggests that the evolutionary modification that gave the world the range-romping toe-walkers was motivated by the desire to save one's own hide, and thus fear and perpetual absence of ease — toe-walking ultimately evolved out of a flight reaction (Malachi 1:2-3, Romans 9:13) — whereas plantigrade came from a stubborn refusal to flee and rather invest in the defense of one's permanent home, which was a home to many. But this in turn not only suggests that Hair (1979) was not about hair, it also implies that proto-carnivores began to bite their fellows also out of fear. But fear of what?

Unlike largely egalitarian schools of natural mystics, herds of toe-walkers most commonly centralize upon a lead individual, usually male: lead bulls, lead rams, lead stallions. These patriarchal leaders are part of the herd they lead. Their females come from the herd and their children join the herd. The carnivores appear to have evolved out of the very early herd animals by the Third Tribe principle. For some reason, they were disfavored by the herd at large and driven to the periphery, where they were most exposed and thus most afraid (Obadiah 1:7).

It's not clear why or how their grass crunching teeth began to change into serpentine fangs, but perhaps their rejection from the herd stemmed from their diminished size and prolonged childish behavior. If so, they might have initially benefitted from their smallness because mothers allowed them to suckle much longer than normal, even into early adulthood (and note the disturbing parallel with the later lactose tolerance of European farmers, or even the striking whiteness of Celts, see our article on Galatia, which to Black people would have been an attribute of a very young child). Their easy and prolonged access to milk may have prompted exploitative and anti-social behavior (carnivores live in much smaller groups than herds), even assaults on their younger siblings (similar to coocoo chicks) or their own mothers who tried to dislodge them from her bleeding teats. This is, of course, a wild guess, but one that would help to explain the otherwise inexplicable folklore that celebrates the systematic exclusion/expulsion/termination of "bad" children (Santa Claus) and even their ritualistic destruction by fire (Moloch), as well as the puzzling popularity of the cinematic trope of the demonic child (Rosemary's Baby, 1968, The Exorcist, 1973, The Omen, 1976, Children Of the Corn, 1977/84, Pet Sematary, 1983/89, The Ring, 1998/2002, Bless The Child, 2000, Dark Water, 2002/05, Orphan, 2009, The Prodigy, 2019, The Pope's Exorcist, 2023; some of these spawned entire series, and all appear to derive from the seminal Lord Of The Flies, 1954).

Every branch will always produce its own Gandalfs and Frodos, but if the branch as a whole is rotten, the Gandalfs will be staffless and the Frodos will be heartless. If the branch is good, the Gandalfs will be wise and the Frodos brave, and so the world is freed from evil. If a Strider pretends to be a Frodo, and that for selfish reasons, now that becomes a whole different story.

The surname of Peter Pan comes from the same root at the word panic, implying that Peter Pan may not be the festive and carefree lad that Disney made him out to be in 1953 (the same year the CIA started the MK-Ultra program). Instead, Peter Pan is a stone cold sociopath who scoffs at both natural law (he flies and separates from his shadow) and human law (he steals and murders), and recruits and entices (i.e. drugs) weak-willed children to pursue the same. The story of Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie, 1904) is one of the foundational texts of the modern age but instead of celebrating perpetual childlike bliss, it sternly warns about underestimating the wonders of adulthood.

The age of speculative philosophy in Greece could commence only because the philosophers literally had nothing better to do: the word school comes from σχολη (schole), meaning rest or freedom from manual labor in order to hang out and do whatever. But it soon was discovered that freedom from labor is not the same thing as freedom by labor, and the dreamers of Greece were enslaved by the more practical Romans: hence the defeat of Atticus by Tom's lawless death (To Kill A Mockingbird, 1960). It was precisely that same disdain for rules and responsibility that ultimately killed George Berger in Hair (albeit after pulling a laudable Sydney Carton on Claude).

When Jesus told his audience to be like children (Matthew 18:3), he certainly did not mean that they should stay cute and helpless and immature whilst leeching off the world built by responsible adults, but rather that they should invest their entire being into growing and learning practical skills so as to become free-by-law eleutherioi. Living means growing and an adult who no longer grows has died as much as a child that no longer grows. Peter Pan is death. He is a killer, a destroyer of worlds. The Child Who Wouldn't Grow Up is the Bad Guy. Duh.

In any polytheistic model, the monotheists are deemed the worst of the bad guys. Polytheism explains reality from origin (Ahnenerbe means Forefathers' Heritage, implying that we moderns are children who should heed our ancient fathers), whereas monotheism explains reality from destiny (the New Jerusalem is peopled by our offspring; we, the fathers, should heed our future adult children, who are so much more advanced than us that they are clairvoyant compared to us).

As mentioned above, the Hebrew word for bride, כלה, kalla, derives from the word for completeness or wholeness (in Greek, πας/παν, pas/pan). In Hebrew, losing your bride means losing your wholeness and thus your mind (1 Timothy 3:2). When Rachel died, Jacob called her son Benjamin, which means Son Of My Right Hand, implying that Rachel was Jacob's right hand (this too explains the Bride of God: Matthew 26:64). Eve, the quintessential wife, was created to be an עזר ('ezer), help, to Adam, and this Hebrew verb mostly describes help in a military sense. The Lord, after all, is a Man of War (Exodus 15:3): Lord Sabaoth (Lord of Armies). Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which means both House Of Bread and House Of War, and he said: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). The name of his mother, Mary or Mariam, reminded everybody at the time of Gaius Marius, whose Marian Reforms had created the dreaded standing Roman Army. It was, after all, Eve who had been beguiled by the serpent (2 Corinthians 11:3, 1 Timothy 2:14).

The first name of Captain Hook is James (same as Jacob, Jack and Jimmy) and his signature hook is a shepherd's crook, a ραβδος (rabdos). His image derives from: "He who overcomes, and he who keeps My deeds until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations — and he shall rule them with a rabdos of iron" (Revelation 2:26-27, see Psalm 2:8-9). A child that elects not to grow up is a child who becomes a Man of Lawlessness (2 Thessalonians 2:3), who comes to destroy and is doomed to destruction.

All this explains why Berger died like a playful child who got stuck in the War Machine (hence also "Like A Child" Donny and "Care For The Rules" Walter in The Big Lebowski, 1998). It also explains much of the character of war hero and soon fratricidal Godfather (1972) Michael Corleone — whose wife, Apollonia reminded the American audience of both the Apollo missions and Apollyon, the Destroyer of Worlds, as envisioned in Revelation 9:11 (who said "nine eleven"?). When in 1945, Oppenheimer witnessed the monstrous power of his creation, he too referred to the Destroyer when he quoted the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." And when Smaug set off for Esgaroth, he too claimed: "I am Death!"

The same sense of mental incompleteness that drives Michael Corleone through America's loveless underworld drives Maximus through a loveless Roman Empire (Gladiator, 2000), Dante through the seven circles of hell (La Comedia, 14th century), John Wick through as many underworld Continentals (John Wick 4, 2023, see Isaiah 42:3), as well as Jason Bourne (The Bourne Identity, 2002), Paul Kersey (Death Wish, 1974), Robert McCall (The Equalizer, 2014), and Henry "Parry" Sagan (The Fisher King, 1991) through their respective loveless worlds. Bravely and most endearingly (and probably somewhat unconsciously), The Boys in the Band (1968-70/2020) meditates on these same themes.

In Disney's viciously racist and antisemitic Fantasia (1940), the "wizard" Yen Sid is nothing but an irresponsible bald-headed entertainer who dupes his gullible apprentice by first letting him get into a sea of lawless trouble, and then showing up to miraculously save the day and violently assert his authority. The story continued in Peter Pan (1953), whose offensive imagery derived from Nazi propaganda.

Not everybody missed this and soon counter-threads began to form the narrative ligaments of a much greater story: Lord Of The Flies and Lord Of The Rings (both from 1954), The Godfather (1972; a godfather is someone who appears to be God the Father, or Jupiter, a play on Julius Caesar; the first real gangster movie was Little Ceasar, 1931; from the name Ceasar comes the German word Kaiser), Paper Moon and Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon (both 1973), The Deer Hunter (1978, which ties into Agamemnon's beef with Artemis, Apollo's twin; The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is from 2017), Hair (1979; Aquarius comes with an uncontrolled flood of feelings; Berger equals Pan), The Shining (1980), Racing with the Moon (1984; bowling symbolizes the self-correcting dynamic of Pop Culture, see Daniel 2:34; the song is from 1941; eight-ball invariably refers to a racket; trains symbolize a connected world but through unfree synthetic paths), Moonstruck (1987), Kingpin (1996; hence the loss of the hand in the machine that returns the ball), The Big Lebowski (1998; hence the loss of Donny not-even-by the Nihilists).

The ultimately objective of fascism (and socialism and communism) is market control, and for this it seeks to eradicate people's control over their own savings: the market's proverbial "invisible hand" (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, 1759). This same invisible hand renders the market its unpredictability, and thus its degree of eleutheria, which is its Sabbatical element — and the Sabbath is the day on which the unfree get to practice skilled freedom, so that they can gently pilot their lives of bondage toward a sustainable state of freedom.

The great and lesser lights mentioned in Genesis 1:16 are not the sun and moon, because the moon is not a light, only a dim reflector of sunlight. The lesser light is the star. In Hebrew, a collective based on a category or definitive individual is signified by a singular form: where in English we speak of the stars in the sky, in Hebrew we say the star in the sky. The familiar term lord of the flies, likewise, is actually lord of the fly, Baal-zebub. Likewise, the familiar term Son of God, does not usually speak of one individual but rather a whole lot (likewise: "sons of the prophets", simply means prophets, and "son of man" simply means one of many humans). In the Bible, stars correspond to the righteous eleutherioi, see Genesis 15:5, Daniel 12:3 and of course Matthew 2:2.

The magnificent film The Shining (1980) derives its core structure from the first half of the dragon cycle of Revelation 12-13 — for the scary lady in room 237 see Revelation 17:15-16. Also note that 237 = 3 x 79, the atomic number of gold, an obvious play on 666, which John mentions at the conclusion of the dragon cycle (the atomic number of carbon, flesh, is 6; hence also Silo-18; Stephen King's novel speaks of 217; see Revelation 21:7); also see Psalm 22:14 and Ezekiel 23. Then, of course, there is king Midas, whose undisputed ability to turn everything into gold also triggered gold's hyperinflation (so that it could only serve to be walked on; hence the proverbial streets of gold: Revelation 21:21, see Ezekiel 7:19, Zechariah 9:3). And The Shining's archetypal maze draws from that of the bullish Minotaur and thus Icarus' ill-fated flight, and hence warns about the abuse of any kind of synthetic wings. The black man's appropriation of the Snow Cat (same as Tinkerbell) did wonders for his upward mobility, but also put him in striking range of the Hotel's archetypal mad steward.

In its localized incarnation on the global timeline (i.e. the US of the late 1970s), The Shining rather obviously contemplates the demise into madness of America's formal chronicler (personified in the reluctantly sober Jack). Prohibition (1920 - 1929) resulted in the formation of the Italian-American mafia, which not only made America rich, it also infected her with fascism. The National Fascist Party was formed in Italy in 1921, also thanks to the socialist policies of Ivanoe Bonomi, who had become Italy's PM on July 4 of that same year (July 4th, 1921: happy birthday, America!). All subsequent forms of fascism followed the original Italian model — hence also the spaghetti scene in Strawberry Blonde, 1941, which Mell Brooks most eloquently elaborated upon in 1974 in the perennial Blazing Saddles Bean Scene (Hitler intended to make the Third Reich vegetarian with everybody eating soy beans, hence the phrase Nazi Bean. As Brooks showed, when the new sheriff is a ni-, volunteers to kill him line up all over the New South).

The US became the Global Policeman (whilst crying "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses"; In the days of Romulus, Rome had started out in exactly the same way, and see Matthew 11:28 and Luke 2:7); hence the Overlook Hotel (with more skeletons in the closet than the Bates Motel; Psycho, 1960, Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975, The House That Jack Built, 2018, in which Jack embodies synthetic inflation: unrighteous lawfulness that inflates into wholesale lawlessness, resulting in anything-goes art, insanity and loss of life; the same character as Sir James in Saltburn, 2023). The Overlook Hotel began to be built in 1907 — the year known for the Panic Of 1907 (a very serious financial crisis due to the collapse of the New York stock exchange), after which a desire was expressed to control the world's money and prevent such calamities. That desire was met by the Federal Reserve Act, upon which the Federal Reserve (the Fed) was created.

The Fed was a wonderful idea, but neither federal nor endowed with any reserves, and thus basically a scam. Hence, the Overlook's signature carpet, the ax and even the signature room number (of the room of scary miss Trixy with the buxom bone structure: i.e. the pirate's skull and bones) derive directly from the Exchange Hotel in Paper Moon, albeit in a second-to-the-right sort of way. The Overlook's interior decorations relate to the American natives the way the Roman Empire related to the Gaul (there are only so many rivers to cross in any kind of style).

Paper Moon is from 1973, yet stubbornly in black and white, because we're clearly no longer not-in-Kansas-anymore. The rainbow has always been the symbol of God's covenant with all flesh (not just some of it, not some chosen few, but all of it, weakling, warts and all; Genesis 9:8-17), and thus the symbol of wholeness and the inclusion by any means of the commonly rejected, the botched and bungled. In the years after the First World War, the rainbow became the symbol of pending justice, of having to pay the price, of being made to face the music: "Just around the corner [פנה, pana], there's a rainbow in the sky, so let's have another cup of coffee [roasted beans], and let's have another piece of pie [drugs, money and sentimental lunacy]" (Face The Music, 1932; Hiter's Nazi Bean idea, concerning white soy beans, was published in 1930 in a Hitler Jugend manual. This explains pretty much every Tarantino scene involving fire or coffee, including the Bonnie Situation, which followed directly from the unfortunate Marvin "accident" (and obvious commentary on the JFK assassination). When Jimmy asks: Am I a ni-? he means: Am I a nazi? It's a rhetorical question.)

Frantically racing through the Overlook's corridors of power, America's very small but omniscient monotheistic conscience became soon faced with the legacy of the slaughter of Japan's innocents, and the father's increasingly outrageous claims.

It is, of course, entirely irrelevant whether "we" actually went to the moon; all that matters is the narrative, and upon that "we" will one day certainly agree (Psalm 12:6). But until we do, there will be story tellers who tell the lies that will inspire foolish men to do horrible things: Manchurian Candidates who activate Manchurian Candidates who activate Manchurian Candidates; seven layers of death and taxes. But those who cry for justice know that it's not the bricklayer who builds the house, because the bricklayer works for the contractor. And the contractor works for the architect. And the architect works within the norms of his trade. And his trade is nothing but another brick in a slowly growing building in which every dollar buys a dollar worth of loyalty and no debt ever gets cancelled. Our present economic system is like an eggshell: a wall that doesn't know what it protects or that its purpose will one day, suddenly, end.

Like the kernels of sand that ants move about, any brick that matches the Great Design will sit there forever. But any brick that doesn't and sticks out will be clipped and curtailed or simply crushed and pulverized. Whoever is invested in the living embryo will live forever. Whoever is invested in the eggshell will lose everything (Isaiah 34:4, Revelation 6:14). And any house that can't be corrected, will entirely fall to the ground and disappear from memory as something that never really existed. Whoever choses destruction will be destroyed. Whoever choses justice will be justified. Whoever wants to live in a reality in which it is clear who shot that man that day, will certainly do so. But whoever wants to live in a reality in which that man was never shot, will certainly do so. It all depends on what centers our world, and what we chose to gravitate upon. Or as Jim Lovell said: "From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it's not a miracle, we decided to go" (Apollo 13, 1995).

The Apollo program was paid for with money made from the global war. It cost 25 billion USD in 1970's dollars, about 1,000 USD per American man, woman and child, which is 10,000 USD per person in modern dollars (fifty grand for a family of five). What 146 BC was to Rome, 1945 AD was to the US. The moon landing was a blood diamond; one of the most expensive vanity projects ever, in many ways comparable to the building of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, and in many other ways to the costly oil that Mary of Bethany poured over the feet of Jesus (John 12:3).

Humanity's feelings cause humanity's doings and when our feelings get hurt, our doings become erratic. It's taken Pop Culture a few decades to process who exactly did what to whom and how long, but objections are mounting. Inattentive men don't realize that a fight with a woman is never about what the fight is about. But that moon is the world's moon, reached for by all our poets. That's not a thing anybody should step on lightly.

Pop Culture is a woman scorned, and although she will unravel this world's largest ball of twine, she is not concerned with who actually physically took the shot that day or whether we actually physically went to the moon or not. Instead, she is fed up with the inconsistencies of any and all stories told by the formal chronicler. Maybe some of his yarns have residual traces of sincerity in them, but even those are now tainted beyond redemption. Not the historical "facts" drive modernity but the unsurpassable chasm between the false narratives forwarded by a band of calculating liars and believed by a host of sycophants, and the ever so faint outline of the Grand Unified Story Of Everything, intuited by a decentralized minority, like a Catcher In The Rye (1951). Not the fidelity of the conspiracy theories are important, but their existence: the cloud of them. They exist, and like a cosmic doctor, they are converging upon a yet obscured consensus, drawn by its shine and squeezing out from us the nothingness that makes us sick.

Darkness is not the opposite of light but the absence of it. Lies are not the opposite of truth but the absence of it.

The lie is polytheism: the idea that there are sides, and bad guys, and that all is not one, that a part can be affected without affecting the whole, that there are actions without reactions or reactions without actions. The lie is magic: the idea that some people don't have to pay their bills, that some debts can be incurred but not repaid, that there are causes without consequences, power without labor, profit without commitment, wisdom without knowledge, freedom without skill, and skill without sacrifice. The lie is the idea that there is theft without retribution. Or salvation without works.

The truth is monotheism: the idea that everything (whether by short paths or long ones, whether linear or non-linear) is connected to everything else, that everything always works together, that no part can be affected without affecting all the others, that every action comes with an equal reaction, that all debts will always be settled. The truth is Grand Unification, the same that produces omniscience plus the freedom to accomplish anything one can image, on the proviso that one figures out how to work it, and that by eliminating what doesn't.

No sane adult will blame any child for a disaster it caused, but instead protects the child even from itself. Any real parent will invest their freedom in making sure that the weak don't get hurt (God's famous "rest" on the Sabbath has nothing to do with weakened vigilance but with absolute freedom and thus perfect governance: Psalm 121:4, Isaiah 40:28-31). An imposter father is a lunar father, an imperfect father: someone who is not wholly free, not omniscient and not omnipotent, who takes naps and cannot protect the child from all dangers, including its own mistakes (in literature, such a disastrous fake-father is commonly referred to by the name Nicholas or Victor or The Conqueror, or any name from segaz or Sieg, such as Siegfried). Such an imposter parent will use their trickery to impress the gullible and frighten the weak into submission and servitude. And since you can't fake danger, as Mr. Perkins observed, you sometimes have to hurt them for real. And put the blame on Mame. (Perkins means Little Peter and thus Little Rock, as in Arkansas. The hymn Rock Of Ages is from 1775, but was made famous by Toplady's hymnal published in July 1776, the very month America was born. Pink is red and white, or blood and water: John 19:34, Revelation 16:4-6. The musical Camelot is from 1960. Jackie is from 2016.)

All living things comprise the terrestrial herd of which the sun is the shepherd and the moon the dog. The moon equals a global government based on subliminal sentiments rather than transparent reason — a natural psychological phenomenon that relates to mankind's collective understanding of the Logos the way one's emotions relate to one's ratio. And the claim of having set foot on the moon is identical to the claim of having taken control of the world's feelings. It doesn't matter whether Americans have actually physically set foot on the moon. What matters is that the story of it is believed, because when it is, deep within humanity's subconscious, whole sets of crackling relays stations make a deciding majority of homies vote for Pedro.

The spiritual equivalent of setting foot on the moon is stepping on one's divinely appointed government (compare Romans 13:1-4 to Numbers 16; note that the reverse of the name Korah, bald, is חרק, haraq, to gnash teeth: Psalm 35:16, 37:12, 112:9-10; Bald Mountain is a euphemism for the belly plus genitals, the seat of the sentiments and counterpart of the ratio), which is precisely what populists do: appeal to the sentiments so as to overthrow reason. When Reagan called Gaddafi a mad dog, America's subconscious mind was turned to Harper Lee and made to recognize in its fatherly president an enlightened lawyer from Athens. When living things travel from cattle to dog, there's usually nothing that can be done for either.

A full moon stands opposite the sun, and when it claims that its light is its own rather than the sun's, it manifests lunacy. If one's goal, one's chosen objective while enjoying abundant food and careless ease, is anything but helping the poor and needy, one is a lunatic (Ezekiel 16:49, 1 John 3:17). It's not "hard" to take a greater leap than present levels of technology allow; such a leap is mere foolish, also because such levels will be commonplace in the near future. "Hard" is having to meet the demands of a "normal" life, having to work a menial job for an ungrateful boss, having to feed but losing one's say-so over children that are dragged off to public schools, where they too learn how to set goals and play Texas.

As the British television audience was watching the moon landing, Pink Floyd provided spacy background music live from the studio (a session that later became the track Moonhead). Shocked with the levels of sentiment manipulation they witnessed (and partook in) and the politicization and commercialization of one of the world's most cherished and sacred symbols, Pink Floyd published The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973. Their tirade against the abuse of money and organized illusion became one of the best-selling albums of all time and Pink Floyd's most commercially successful, wryly demonstrating all points made.

Two decades earlier, Moon River (or White River) equaled the European-Jewish popular desire for eleutheria and subsequent resistance to fascist usurpation, as expressed in European folk tales and music (hence also the waterwheel-railroad scene in The Long Kiss Goodnight, 1996; see Revelation 12:1, Romans 16:20, Matthew 5:13; Genesis 3:15). The obscure "dark side of the moon" — "keep your sunny side up, up; hide the side that gets blue", 1929 — equals the Black version of the obvious White one: the Blues.

In the early 20th century, the WASP establishment in the US vilified anything Black, and Black music could enter the mainstream only because entrepreneurial Jewish publishers (whose sacrosanct culture strongly resonated with the Black diaspora and exile: Isaiah 11:11-13) ran with it. The Brits were not as polarized on race as the Americans and absorbed Black-Jewish music like a sponge; hence the famous "invasion" of the US by British bands (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks, the Animals) that went around and came around like a bowling bowl from the depths of the human kosmos. As told by the ever-omniscient Pop Culture, Zed the Hillbilly soon expired, Silent Butch took the French Lady for a ride on machinal Grace, and the Muddy Waters (or Darksaber if you're into The Mandalorian) flooded the world's dustbowl and revived seeds that had laid dormant for eons but now leapt to life in thunderous cheers (Revelation 14:2, Ezekiel 43:2; ACDC's Thunderstruck is from 1990; Pulp Fiction is from 1994, note the obvious tie-ins of the briefcase code, the father's watch and Lance the drug dealer; Braveheart, also about mister Wallace, is from 1995).

Rock music empowered both the hippies (Summer of Love, 1967; Woodstock, 1969) and the civil rights movement (1954-1968). Capitalism's countermove, the Nixon Shock (1971), culminated in America's betrayal of the gold standard, which was the financial equivalent of denying the centricity of the sun (i.e. gold as global standard) and thus the treading underfoot of the moon by haughty dream-weaving cosmonauts (Gary Wright, 1972). It was the end of economic reason, logic and righteousness. Utter madness ensued, and the world began to end. Fortunately for everybody, the Christ resurrects.

The Nixon Shock happened precisely a Sabbath Year (or Jubilee) after the formation of the National Fascist Party in Italy in 1921, implying the forgiveness of a "debt that can't be repaid" (i.e. a debt that was never incurred — nor the Blacks nor the Jews nor the Natives nor, probably, the innocents of Japan will ever agree to this denial), which in turn alludes to article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, the one that Hitler was so upset with (article 237 speaks of the fair division of Germany's reparations; there were 237 aye-voters to the treaty). Paramount meditated on these complexities and their far reaching consequences during the seven season run of Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001); the exhausted Caretaker being an obvious instance of the mad steward trope.

Jack Torrance writes all the time but all he ever puts to paper are varying shapes of the proverb: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" (ascribed to James Howell, 1659), which obviously comments both on the crucial importance of keeping the Sabbath (the day of play: the governed opportunity of children and indentured servants to practice freedom-by-law), and of keeping the moon from going rogue (which is freedom-from-law, or rabies).

As Spielberg showed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), beneath the island of reason (spun from solid human languages) there exist real and useable languages spoken in other sorts of continuums: colors, sounds, gestures, forms, fabrics, smells, literary references, movie tropes (hence also Arrival, 2016). In every conversation or artistic presentation, and especially in big budget movies (in which years of meditation by thousands of people are condensed into a few hours of pure fire), multiple stories are told in multiple languages. The audience may consciously think they're watching one story, while several, completely different but equally carefully composed accounts are being downloaded into their subconscious by means of color and sound codes. Studying these under-water stories is great fun, but the trick, of course, is to not get sucked in too deep, and to somehow stay connected to the dry land, with a means ready to pull out at the first sign of trouble (like Dorothy's three heel-clicks). Insane asylums and homeless shelters are full of people who confidently jumped in but couldn't find their way back out (Matthew 14:30).

The following is perhaps a bit show-offy, but it demonstrates why so many people find studying the Bible so much fun. Studying the Bible is the grown-up blown-up version of studying The Shining:

Following one of a few secondary stories told in The Shining, this one is told in terms of Danny and Wendy's outfits:

1. Still at home, Wendy wears a red-blue Mother Mary outfit and Danny wears a shirt featuring either Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner (see οδος, hodos, road) plus The Shining's ubiquitous number 42, which is the number of karma or cosmic justice — of the rainbow, basically (the 42 degrees of the rainbow angle is determined by how light refracts in water, a cosmic compound property of the two elements of life), hence the 42 judges of Ma'at, the 42 parts of Osiris, the many occurrences of 42 in the Bible, in short, the "the answer to the ultimate question..." as given in Matthew 7:12 and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (first published in 1978; Galaxy Quest is from 1999; the word "galaxy" or Milky Way comes from the Greek word for milk: γαλα, gala). Or in the words of Holly Golightly: "I can't get excited by a man unless he's forty-two."
   Later in The Shining, the film shown on TV is Summer of '42, which, true to context and like Racing with the Moon, which also plays in '42, tells of the violent loss of America's innocence. The scene's pivotal line is "I'm going to have some coffee". In 1942, the United States began to be a war machine. That same year the Manhattan Project began in earnest, and the OSS was formed, which became the CIA in '46 (hence also the Miami connection in The Shining). Danny is called Doc, which immediately calls to mind Doctor Zhivago — the story of literature healing the diseased nation (hence too Beverly telling the EMH to "do a dance, tell a story" in First Contact), whilst cooped up in an abandoned ice-palace (the book is from 1957; the movie is from 1965; the quintessential imposter-father is Victor Ippolitovich; Jack's head wound corresponds to Strelnikov's facial gash, and both to Revelation 13:3; our word "race" is thought to derive from the Hebrew ראש, rosh, head, so the multi-headed Chimeras of Daniel and Revelation are federations and international alliances).
2. When Danny first sees the slain sisters, he wears a Philadelphia Flyers sports jacket. Philadelphia is where America's independence from the evil British Empire was formally declared, only to become a much worse one (obviously after Revelation 13). Wings reminded the ancients of covering and protecting (that's angelic and natural) but to modern Westerners, the word Flyers remind of the synthetic or even wingless flights of Icarus and Peter Pan (that's demonic, unreal). Jack asks if Danny is tired of bombing the universe. Dick asks Danny if he likes lamb to eat (he doesn't, and accepts chocolate ice cream). Wendy wears brown over white.
3. At dawn the next morning, Wendy delivers breakfast and wears a yellow-and-blue robe (note the chandeliers dimming overhead: Revelation 12:1). Jack is shown in the mirror. Stovington (a fictional school) is Stove or Staving Town: a place of burning or crucifixion (a grim wink to the Nazi death camps). Wendy places her foot on the bed, so as to have the moon at her feet.
4. In the maze, Wendy wears red over blue. Danny wears pink checkers over brown. On the trike, Danny wears blue over red over blue checkers. The door to 237 (or 3 x 79, i.e. thrice gold) is locked like the Gordian Knot of King Midas of Phrygia, the one with the golden touch; hence also Disney's Big Bad Wolf: Zeke (i.e. Ezekiel, a Jew) Midas, i.e. Global Finance who huffs and puffs at the houses of little local piggy banks.
5. During the first main hall encounter, Jack wears green and Wendy wears blue over red shoes, invoking the story of the dancing Red Shoes (also whence Dorothy's Red Shoes; The Dancing Wu Li Masters is from 1979).
6. Wendy trying to work the radio is dressed like Tiger Lily, which in turn recalls the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol Building (as does The Blob, 1958, the offensive song What Made the Red Man Red? also contemplates the presence of "barbaric" Communism in civilized and technological US; Tiger Lily embodies the Tiger Economies of Asia). Wendy hailing the Forest Service bridges the same narrative arc as Jenny hailing Forrest; hence also Lieutenant Dan and his Susan, which is Hebrew for Lily (Forrest Gump, 1994), and of course Zefram and Lily (Star Trek, First Contact, 1996), and James and Lily Potter (Harry's parents). Right before his second meeting with the sisters (that shows them dead, forever and ever and ever), Danny trikes by the Revelation 17:4 sign (about the cups and garbage), a clock that says 18:10 and a sign that says No Smoking; see Revelation 9:1-11, 14:11, 18:9. Tony (Tonya in Dr. Zhivago), comes from Anthony, reminiscent of Mark Anthony, the quintessential friend-turned-enemy of Augustus, and named after a son of Heracles, whose cosmic story of the twelve labors started with a prayer to Apollo, and whose name reminds of ανθος (anthos), flower, whereas a flower is a plant's widely opened and exposed sexual organ. Tony obviously constitutes a nod to the flower-power hippie movement: a sincere but somewhat immature and exhibitionistic voice of conscience, formalized in Ginsberg's Howl (1956), a.k.a. "a lament for the Lamb in America". The term hippy or hipster originated in appreciation of black music and the lifestyle of Mailer's White Negro (1957), a compounded complexity in whom blended the traumas of slavery, poverty, the holocaust and the atomic bomb; hence the harmonic concert of the enlightened and obscured faces of the singular moon, the term cool to describe contained composure (the very meaning of the name Jacob/Jack: Poker Face, as in Texas hold 'em) and Danny's appreciation of chocolate ice-cream (offered by Dick; Nixon was the Republican vice president from '53 to '61 and president from '69 to '74, in effect sandwiching the Blue Kennedy-Johnson years, making him the Republican Red Door (Behind The Red Door, 2003) through which Jack stuck his Blue lunar "here's Johnny" face. Some say the seeds of Nixon's demise were sowed by the Kennedy doings. Nixon began and coined the term War of Drugs).
7. When Danny enters Jack's bedroom, he wears a sweater with Mickey Mouse kicking a football: obviously in reference to Kennedy's Rice versus Texas remark. His uneasy sitting down on Jack's lap depicts the moon landing.
8. Danny wears an Apollo 11 sweater when a rolling ball from nowhere — reminiscent of a bowling ball that goes around and comes around and returns to the bowler out of the underworld (Daniel 2:34) — hits Danny's lined up toy cars, at once evoking the hit on Kennedy's motorcade. The mystery ball surely must have come from room 237, which Danny finds opened with a key with a bright red label. Red is the color of market control, which the usurpers claim by means of narcotics (or booze) and populism (the much discussed difference between communism, socialism and fascism is a distraction; they're all the same thing, namely the desire to turn the living market into a deterministically predictable machine). The thrice-gold motif (3 x 79) corresponds to the Three Feathers whiskey in Paper Moon; the Greek word for wing comes from the word for feather. In 237, Danny asks: "Mom, are you in there?" But Wendy is in the Boiler Room (the emotional belly of the hotel), wearing brown over green checkers and fiddling with high voltage equipment whilst reading the how-to's from a clipboard manifesto.
9. Jack has a dream, the most horrible dream ("I have a dream": Martin Luther King, August '63, three months before JFK's assassination; King was shot in '68). Danny walks in, evidently violated by the lady in 237, still wearing his Apollo 11 sweater. Wendy picks him up and backs out the main hall while declaring to Jack: "You did this to him!" Soon after, however, she becomes convinced that the scary lady is the real culprit.
10. During Dick and Danny's joint vision, Danny wears bright red (Revelation 19:13), the same red that opened the door to 237 (see Revelation 3:7). Jack enters but says he saw "nothing" in 237, which is probably true. Danny first sees the word REDRUM in lipstick-red letters. Then he sees the blood of the saints, prophets and witnesses of Jesus (Revelation 16:4-6, 17:6, 18:24), while the rainbow-shaped elevator dials say 12, pointing to the dragon cycle of Revelation 12 as well as the 12 labors of Hercules. Jack explains to Wendy why it is important that he remains the caretaker of the Hotel. Lloyd, the drug dispensing oracle, pours him a Jack-Daniels (a play on father-son, also Julius and Augustus Caesar; also see the very obvious homage by the moron-pushing-the-last-legal-drug scene in As Good As It Gets, 1997). Lloyd also explains Jack why he doesn't have to pay for his bourbon. Lloyd's uniform and that of Delbert derive from military uniforms. Lloyd is Intelligence and Delbert, with his British accent, embodies the Quebec Agreement.
11. While watching Roadrunner, Danny wears brown over red (and drinks chocolate milk). Wendy knocks out Jack (after Revelation 12:7-12) and hides him in the room with the food supplies, where he has a conversation with Delbert, the helpful scientist. Jack escapes (Revelation 20:3) and begins to kill.
12. Crying REDRUM, Danny wears a mostly red sweater over blue checkers. Jack tries to break through the door (Genesis 4:7). Wendy, blue over green checkers and knife in hand (corresponding with the sword of the Statue of Freedom; also see Luke 2:35), runs off and witnesses an unholy union between a western gentleman and a bear-bodied yellow-faced Chimera, then a wounded western gentleman speaking of a great party (Camp David Accords, 1978). The subsequent assassination of Sadat occurred in 1981, a year after The Shining was released.

It took the ancient herds a while to figure out what was going on (if they ever did), but ultimately the small proto-carnivorous parasites, the kids who refused to grow up and were more into finding the free fountain of youth than in pulling their weight, were driven out (Revelation 12:7-9). Evolution favored the better biters and turned them into the carnivores that have ever since patrolled the periphery of the herds. While the carnivores preyed on the weak and young, the herd began to respond to their threat and presence much more than to the wise guidance of the experienced lead males. The patriarchal leaders became minor locals. The carnivores became the kingly elite of the herds (Genesis 36:31).

The typically Greek story of the Olympians, captained by Zeus, who defeated and replaced the Titans, captained by Cronus, Zeus' father, tells of this primal transfer of power from the familial patriarchy to the predatorial government. That means that the Greek myths tell of the same realities as the Bible does, but from the perspective of the toe-walkers and specifically the carnivores. Note that Herod was an Idumean, a descendant of Esau, and thus a typical fear-driven (or fear-driving) toe-walker. John the Revelator speaks of "the healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:2), strongly suggesting that he meant the word "nation" as synonym of the word "sick" (Matthew 9:12).

The sickness of fear that is upon the nations today stems from the predatorial governments who have taken the place of the natural patri- and matriarchs by violent usurpation. When addressing the anti-Greek Jewish purists at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30), Jesus quoted Isaiah and spoke of restoring sight to the blind (an obvious wink to Homer) and freedom to the captives (an obvious wink to father Cronos, imprisoned in Tartarus). The Jews responded by accidentally acting out the story of Sisyphus (Luke 4:29-30), which demonstrates that nobody's best intentions can thwart God's eternal designs. Without man's peaceful union with the dog, there would have been no modern world, and while there is still much wrong with our world today, we owe much of our modern blessings to the efforts of our canine friends (hence also Debbie the Big Nose Dog Mom in Everything Everywhere All At Once, 2022).

Isaiah predicts that [some of] the carnivores will learn to eat straw, like the herds (Isaiah 65:25, see Star Trek: Insurrection, 1998, and Hellboy, 2004/'08/'19), which in turn implies that the massive herds will dissolve into much smaller family groups, managed by birth control rather than predation, which will once again be headed by their biological patri- and matriarchs (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11; Isaiah 9:6 see 1 Corinthians 15:24). When the herds have become impervious to fear, the carnivores will either go the way of the dinosaurs or become the family pet (Isaiah 11:6-8).

The invention of Bitcoin facilitates a massive transfer of wealth, and thus power, from the wolves that hold it now to those nerdy few who first understood the self-similarity between blockchain and the Gospel, believed both and despite the laughter of the mighty, started swapping their few dollars for those ethereal Sats (Matthew 13:46, Revelation 3:18). Besides speed, a predator's main weapon is stealth and secrecy, and likewise, modern economic theory insists that secrecy is some kind of virtue. Blockchain is a public ledger, which makes secrets obsolete and theft impossible. With blockchain, all the books literally open and that is precisely what terrifies the predators (Luke 12:3, John 7:4, Revelation 20:12). Instead of having to fork over their resources to a tyrannical predator, people will have the freedom to invest their own labor where they want it, and make the human world a quantum impact pattern of everybody and not a mere few massive quarks.

It'll get rough first but everybody who survives the Last War (Revelation 20:9) will have uncompromisable financial autonomy and sovereignty (Exodus 19:6, Daniel 7:18, 1 Corinthians 6:2, 1 Peter 2:9). First the old economy must collapse, and that will be accompanied by war, hunger and chaos — the severity of which will be depend entirely on how seriously we now prep for it (like pregnant people who calmly and rationally prepare for the delivery), but then the universe will once again become transparent (Isaiah 9:2) and light will once again fill all void (Habakkuk 2:14).

Unlike hairy (i.e. fear-driven) Esau, Jacob was hairless, or rather: fearless, or rather: not driven by his fear (which he obviously had) but by something much greater than one's personal sentiments. Unlike Esau, Jacob did not lift his heel but planted his flat feet firmly on the ground. Unlike Esau, Jacob wasn't a migratory man of the field, but preferred to stay at home, which is a central base shared with multiple familiars. Jacob was a home-builder, and the Hebrew word for home is the same as that for temple: בית (bayit or beth in compounds like Bethlehem or Bethel). From the Greek word for house, namely οικος (oikos), plus the word for law, namely νομος (nomos), comes the compound noun οικονομος (oikonomos), house-rules, from which in turn comes our English word "economy". So no, Jacob was not simply building a shack to flop in.

The fear-driven toe-walkers are all related. And the home-building flat-footers are all related, which means that we apes are closely related to flat-footed animals like rabbits, beavers and mice. We have the same challenged gait and the same urge to live in holes, burrows, lodges, caves, tents or condos. The demarcation isn't a razor edge: there is considerable overlap. Foxes, for instance, live in holes but are nevertheless fearful toe-walkers (which perhaps warrants the famous nod: Matthew 8:20). Bears, likewise, dwell in caves and are fearless flat-footers, but are late converts from the dog branch and still quite carnivorous. Elephants look like flat-footers but are really tip-toe-walkers, albeit from a whole other and fearless branch: the Ishmael to our Isaac, the father of Jacob and Esau.

The Greek word for mouse is μυς (mus), which relates to μυστηριον (musterion), meaning mystery or mystic. And that's no coincidence. A rabbit who sits at the back end of her hole has only a very narrow window upon the outside world. But in order for her to know whether it's safe to emerge, she somehow needs to create an image of the outside world that she cannot see. That means that she has to pick up the tiniest vibrations, the most minute whispers of sound and whisps of scents, and (as scientists are increasingly showing to exist) information directly from the greater continuum of consciousness, and combine all this with generalized tropes (i.e. proto-words) stored in her immediately available working memory, and fill in any blanks as well as she can. Moreover, she has to very closely listen to her neighbors, the sounds they transmit, and imagine what real threat, or absence thereof, those sounds translate into.

And that can go three ways:

1. Our rabbit continuously predicts accurately whether it's safe to come out. Perfectly clairvoyant rabbits like this are quite rare, but we're learning.
2. Our rabbit is not cautious enough, and fails to predict a fox who stands above the hole waiting for our rabbit to confidently emerge. In that case, our rabbit gets eaten.
3. Our rabbit is too cautious, and thinks there is a fox, while there isn't one. In this case, our rabbit stays in her hole, eats less and meets less mates. Only real things can have measurable effects, and The Fox Who Wasn't There is a most pernicious kind of demon, one made entirely of darkness and only typical for mystic kinds of minds. This demon causes weakness, worry and fear, and is defeated only by skill and confidence (and that from confirmed hits, not from wishful thinking).

Flat-footers are natural mystics. While toe-walkers crave the clarity of wide open vistas, mystics draw toward the sensory-poor environment of caves — which implies that the famous Stone Age cave paintings are ancient exercises in remote viewing. In the absence of soot marks, archeologists wonder how the ancients were able to create these drawings without light. The obvious answer is that they trained their minds to retain an image of what their hands were doing in the dark. The real miracle, of course, is how the audience managed to see the paintings (if they ever did; perhaps via these drawings we moderns were the first to literally read the minds of these ancient artists).

In our modern world, fiction writers tend to be natural mystics, although not all fiction writers are true mystics. Dog-like creatures such as foxes and badgers also live in holes, but their mysticism is carnivorous and predatorial (like Icarus, they aggressively pursue the light rather than allowing it to generously dawn on them) and ultimately selfish rather than communal and global or even universal. In between the toe-walkers and the flat-footers sits the order of the Eulipotyphla, which includes hedgehogs, shrews and moles. Since Christian scholastic theology emerged from essentially a synthesis of Jewish (flat-foot) and Greek (toe-walking) traditions, Christian monasticism may correlate to the permanent subterranean lifestyle of moles.

In literature and mythology, the trope of the cave nearly always speaks of meditative contemplation within one's own mind. From Sarah's tomb at Machpelah (Genesis 23:1-20, see 24:62-67), which suggests that imagination and meditation originated in the commemoration of the dead (the Greek for tomb or memorial, namely μνημειον, mnemeion, comes from the verb μναομαι, mnaomai, to remember, from which English gets words like mnemonic), to Elijah's experience of the still small voice (1 Kings 19:12-13, see Exodus 33:22), to the raising of Lazarus and of course Jesus himself (the name Golgotha means skull and closely relates to the terms Gilgul and Galilee), to the re-emergence of Odysseus from the lair of the Cyclops (which means "cycle eye" or "round eye", not "one eye"; the terms גלל, galal, to roll or rotate, and "cycle" are quite similar, and these stories tell of the same fundamental physical principle, albeit through different eyes) and that of Bilbo from the lair of Smaug (Hobbits too are natural troglodytes, although Hobbit holes, as everyone knows, are neat and hospitable and not nasty, dirty or wet). Plato's famous but silly depiction of consciousness involved shadows on a cave's wall. Muhammad received the Quran in a cave. And Leonardo da Vinci's lost years were "spent in a cave". Subsequently, some of da Vinci's most striking paintings have a perspective from within a cave outward — the "windows" in the background are one's eyes looking out into the physical world, the depicted scene sits within one's mind: see his Last Supper, Madonna and Child with Flowers, Madonna Litta, Virgin of the Rocks, Madonna of the Carnation. Entirely likewise, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (1865) commenced at the deep end of a rabbit hole.

Toe-walkers regard only the obvious world, with themselves as the supreme center of it all, but flat-footers regard the entirety of the world, its visible and invisible parts, and regard themselves as mere one of many equal players in the grand and singular and decentralized scheme of it all. Flat-footers are natural monotheists and recognize the oneness of everything. They are imaginers, and imagination — i.e. the ability to conjure up a verifiable image of invisible reality — is where our celebrated human consciousness originates. The Greek verb for to imagine, to form an image internally, is δοκεω (dokeo), hence the noun δοξα (doxa), which corresponds to the Hebrew noun כבד (kabud), and both are commonly translated with "glory": that aspect of God which filled the temple. The latter word literally means weight, and explains the correlation between the mass of relativity theory, the body mass of an animal and the mass-equivalence of a collective imaginary mind based on language.

The flat-footers also collectively stopped leaning on their front limbs, and began to repose on their aft end, not unlike birds. Their front limbs they began to use, not only to dig with but also to bring food to their faces, to look at it and smell it before they put it into their mouths, like a kind of pre-mouth from which they could eject undesired objects before it actually touched their bodily fluids. Toe-walkers bring their faces to the food but flat-footers bring food to their faces, and their faces stay still and alert, like the sun amidst its planets.

Front feet became hands, and some abandoned their holes and took to the trees. Some even developed opposable thumbs, which couldn't have happened without flat feet first, and began to hold tools.

Judging from our big round eyes, monkeys and apes emerged from the night, probably as Fittest Survivors. Early hominids, however, appear to have been driven out of the forest and onto the savannahs in a Third Tribe event. But the same innate fearlessness that once let their remote ancestors press their heels to the ground now allowed them to stare down fire, and ultimately capture it and contain it in the first of the technological installations: the fire place (Exodus 3:2-4). Dogs, likewise, appear to have been the nerdy outcast of the wolve tribe. They too overcame the fear of fire, although they would never understand technology and always simply trusted their human companions who could.

Our human world today is peopled to a very large degree by the herd-minded, who are governed by the dog-minded. True shepherd-minded people are perhaps not as rare as most animals think, but only a shepherd can recognize another shepherd. Non-shepherds can't really recognize the species (Adam named the animals, not the animals themselves; Genesis 2:19-20), and can certainly not comprehend the technology that sets shepherds apart from other animals. Neither wild animals, nor farm animals, nor even dogs truly consider the roads and buildings and fences they encounter. They don't wonder where these things came from, or even realize that these things are synthetic and were willfully designed and manufactured by humans. Animals don't understand roads and fences and gates, leashes and saddles and reigns, and don't comprehend in what way these items interfere with their natural inclinations, behavior or view on the world. And animals don't understand other animals, how wonderfully strange and different they all are, and how very different all of them experience reality. Only shepherds do.

Shepherds live among us, but they are not brightly shining and haloed creatures with obvious superiority. They are tiny compared to cows, horses, moose and elephants. They are silly weaklings compared to gorillas, bears and tigers. Dogs easily outrun them. Mice and rabbits swipe their food. Birds sit on branches and laugh at their antics from afar.

The names "Spillebeen" and "Prikkebeen" both translate as Spindle Leg, which is a feature common to desk jockeys (authors, administrators, scholars, IT people), and contrasts the beefy calves of manual laborers (the proverbial proletariat). Mister Spindle Leg is a variant of Doctor Dolittle, whose name formally derives from some lofty Gaelic term but in the popular mind clearly refers to society's incorrigible idlers or little-doers. The apparent contradiction between doing nothing and being very learned is explained by the Greek term σχολη (schole), which means rest, leisure or freedom from manual labor in order to pursue learning (hence our English words school and scholar). Entirely likewise, the marvelous invention of the Day of Rest, the Sabbath, upon which all people and animals were given the opportunity to practice the otherwise unobtainable condition of eleutheria, was in antiquity widely explained as Jewish laziness. Its effect, however, was that talents that were deeply buried beneath layers of bondage and duty could emerge like fluttering sprouts and produce masterly insights and works of art.

The Dutch Mijnheer Prikkebeen (1858) translates the original Monsieur Cryptogame (Mister Cryptogram) or Herr Steckelbein (Mister Spindle-Leg, 1848), the world's first modern comic strip (a text-picture hybrid like the ubiquitous man-beast centaurs and fauns of old), by the Swiss teacher Rodolphe Töpffer. This seminal story was in 1881 adapted by the Italian Collodi into Pinocchio (both stick-figures travel around the world and spend a stint in a whale's belly, which obviously combines Jonah's great fish and Dante's inferno). Moby Dick is from 1851 (the peg-legged captain Ahab obviously manifests the Spindle-Leg trope; Queequeg serves as Ishmael's noble-heathen Virgil). Nietzsche's Übermensch is from 1883. The American Superman "from Krypton" is from 1938, (and for the fans: Boudewijn de Groot's Prikkebeen is from 1968, and Rob de Nijs' Dag Zuster Ursula is from 1973 and faithfully celebrates matrilocality).

Monsieur Cryptogame is a dedicated lepidopterist (in Western mythology, the butterfly symbolizes the human psyche or soul, most specifically the disembodied soul post-Resurrection); The Butterfly's Ball, and the Grasshopper's Feast by William Roscoe, is from 1802; hence also Pinocchio's Jiminy Cricket. Crickets, of course, are not only typical spindle-legs, but sing like frogs in large naturally synchronizing choirs, utilizing the very same principle via which the Bible was formed. A famous violator of this creative principle was Icarus, whose greedy dissonance caused him to plummet back to earth. The word choir closely relates to the familiar word χαρις (charis), which describes the communal or social felicity via which salvation comes (Ephesians 2:8), hence words like charm, charity, charisma.

Note that until the invention of the inexpensive ballpoint pen, people commonly wrote with styli or quills — hence also the story of Nils Holgersson (1906) by Selma Lagerlöf, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1909. As an obvious expansion of the Spindle-Leg trope, Bulgakov's Master and Margarita is from 1928-1967. Woody from Toy Story too is an obvious Spindle-Leg.

Pinkeltje means Pinkie, the smallest of the five fingers (1 Kings 12:10), hence also Lord Petyr Baelish in Game Of Thrones. The Dutch expression "bij de pinken zijn" (to be pinkied up) means to be smart or clever, as the word pink is Rotwelsch-Yiddish for petty cash or a small penny bag. But although the pinkie is the smallest, it's certainly not the least of the fingers. In fact, it's the electron of bodily members: whereas the massive thumb manifests bonds between fingers, the little finger signifies bonds between hands (i.e. joining hands is joining efforts; the pinkie signifies social bonds), which explains the ubiquitous "pinkie-swear" and folks pointing at the Torah with the pinkies during hagbah.

Paulus (Paul) means Little, and Silas means Arboreal. The word gnome relates to the Greek γνωμη (gnome), from the verb γινωσκω (ginosko), to know. The Dutch word kabouter obviously relates to the noun we discussed above, כבד (kabud), weighty, impressive, glorious: imaginative.

The signature pointy red (sometimes blue) hat, a wizard's hat, derives from the Jewish cap (and no, the shepherds do not equal modern Jews, although there is obvious overlap). Outside the Netherlands, a more common depiction of this elusive, covert but mighty tribe of red-hatted mini-people is as a little ginger girl — Heidi, Annie, Merida, Ariel, Pippi Langstrump (hence also the white-hatted Belgian Smurfs, 1958) whose subjection to constant pressure turns them into eternal (blond/blue) diamonds: hence Holly Golightly and Annie (both explicit fans of Tiffany's), the hysterically funny Lorelei Lee (the Lorelei is an enchanted dwarf-housing rock in the Rhine; nobody in post-war Germany would have missed this reference to the Heinrich Heine poem) and Material Girl Madonna (and the Pink Panther, 1963, Marathon Man, 1976, and so on).

Pink, of course, sits in between ginger and blonde (P!nk = a ginger girl in a blonde's body), and speaking of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953): the diamond mine owner's name is Piggy, which might have been informed by the otherwise rather curious phenomenon of the piggy-bank, the symbol of capitalistic hoarding: being fat, rich and knowledgeable, but all for one's own selfish pleasures rather than in service of society (the word "pig" originates in a root meaning small or childish). Both Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ('53) and Lord Of The Flies ('54) prominently feature a boy named Piggy. In Greek, a double gg is pronounced ng or nk (meaning that a Greek speaker with no knowledge of English would pronounce the word Piggy as Pinkie). No Greek word resembling piggy or pinkie exists but the Hebrew word פגג (pagag) means early or unripe fig, equivalent to the ever useful term μορον (moron) in Greek, which would help to explain the trope of the dimwitted daddy-pleasing blonde — who is secretly as clever as queen Esther ("blond ambition" is an ambition to do whatever it takes to protect the weak). The Dumb Blonde is the Artemisian girl who wouldn't grow up, so as to protect the weak and vulnerable from her masculine counterpart Peter Pan, the eternal Apollonian bully.

As in the Netherlands every child and former child knows, Pinkeltje is a very small man (not some otherworldly elf, but a true human man in a homoousion sort of sense), and although he lives in a human house (in a hole with five mice) and is always very helpful to everyone, he only reveals his existence and activities to author Dick Laan (a laan is a lane, a wide path, or pad or toad), the same who insists that Pinkeltje is so "terrifyingly" old that he doesn't remember how old he is, and is able to speak all languages of humans and animals (which is the defining quality of shepherds; they speak [in] all languages: see 1 Kings 4:34, Iliad 2.803-4 , Acts 2:8). The first Pinkeltje book was published in 1939, in Amsterdam. It tells how Pinkeltje appeared in a rainstorm, seated on a flying chestnut leaf that the storm had lifted from the forest of Pinkeltje's origin (Paulus The Wood Gnome was first published in 1946). A stork (the quintessential frog eater and baby deliverer) picked him up and dropped him into the burrow of a glow worm, who took him to a family of moles, then a bee, a squirrel and finally the first of the five domestic mice.

Pinkeltje is any small frugal saver (of money, knowledge, skill, friends: any little expertise by which we serve our environment) in a Keynesian sense (Keynes' seminal book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is from 1936). Pinkeltje is an angel investor in the broadest sense: a minor and anonymous donor whose unregulated and decentralized tribe votes with every wisely spent penny humanity on its intended course, as if by an invisible hand (that tends to strangle the less frugal).

And speaking of Keynesian economics: a covenant governs a voluntary transaction of equal values (only when buyer and seller willingly agree on the value of a good or service, the transaction occurs) and banks and casinos don't make their money by charging interest on loans (because again, these are equal transactions) but by preying on weak players who are forced to renege on their part of the deal and so lose their collateral. The house always wins, but that's not because the house is better at playing the game: every loser started playing thinking they could win (and the vast majority of "winners" soon become losers again). The only way to profit from the game is by not playing the game but hosting it, and let the losers play it (the same is true for war). The transaction is always between different forms of equal values (that's the first law of thermodynamics applied to money), but the loser is always the guy who carries the risk, which is not the house but the assembly of players. The transaction is always equal but when one of the parties can't keep their side of the bargain, the party who managed to get the other guy to carry the risk ends up with all of the goods. The dealio that doesn't get emphasized enough in covenant theology is that God initiates the covenant, sets the terms of the covenant and carries the risk. That's economic foolishness and ultimately utter suicide (John 10:17-18).

Man's part of the deal is to learn God's natural law and so create an everlasting technological paradise where everybody is safe and healthy (Philippians 2:12): a house where the Creator God loves to move in like a matrilocal husband. A woman who accepts a targeted offer from an identified man is a prostitute. A proper suiter is someone who anonymously invests in his love interest, so that she has all the freedom in the world to finally chose him, in no way coerced.

Luther was happy to point out that works are not salvific, but forgot to point out that not doing any works is certainly damning. Of course salvation comes solely from God, but damnation too comes from God. And the wisdom to tell the difference between the two and chose one's path wisely, also comes from God. So no, God's free gift of salvation does not at all imply that works are not salvific. If anything, works too are a gift from God. Man's works are Gods way to give us gratis salvation in exactly the same way that submission to God's Law yields freedom.

The universe was "allowed" to produce DNA and pay the entropic bill later, and so man's works are the effect of his future salvation. Since man so far has failed to bring forth this earthly paradise, God, who carries the risk, loses his collateral, namely his Son. Jesus dies because lazy people insist that they don't have to work.

People who understand money know that money cannot transfer without the transfer of equal value in return. This not only means that extracting money from society is equal to extracting the poison of laziness from society and generating economic activity in its place (central banks are not society's treasuries but its sewers; libraries are its treasuries). It also means that any donation always elicits a reaction from the recipient that is equal to the value of the donation. If that reaction is not a specified good or service, the recipient must pay back in gratitude and loyalty to the giver. A non-anonymous donation is an insidiously hidden purchase, namely of the soul of the recipient, which becomes tethered to the giver. Only a shower of many small but anonymous donations will cause the recipient to "pay back" the investment radially out into their general environment.

The word "God" and even the name "YHWH" are not the identifying terms by which God introduced himself to us when he lavished his blessings on us (and so would have made us slaves to him: Exodus 6:3), but rather the words we humans began to use when we spoke in exited whispers about the One who anonymously gave us salvation (and knowledge and skill to bring it about), and whose full identity we will discover when we have built a house where he wants to be (on the proviso that we didn't prematurely create an image of Him that can only be false; a fixed image whether chiseled in stone, graven in dogma or sculpted from fantasies). A person who waits for God is like a woman who waits for the promised husband she hasn't yet been with: dedicated, organized and faithful (Proverbs 31:10-31) as if she was indeed married, and whose present maturation stems from her future marriage.

People who don't know what's going on easily confuse angels and demons, think Pinkeltje is evil, believe false evangelists and accuse true ones of not using the magic words or identifying labels or having sold their soul to the devil for earthly gain. Others very easily recognize a whispering shepherd on an artist's shoulder. Whether consciously or not and whether deliberately or not, the Faustian Dick Laan was very obvious in touch with the mythology of the shepherds, and since grownups were too busy to take heed, he told it to children, in a vernacular and imagery that the children could understand. This is why today, everybody in the Netherlands intuitively knows that animals don't recognize the shepherds who are changing the entire vast world and are filling it with synthetic structures. Animals simply don't have the faculties to recognize the reality of the shepherds and what makes shepherds so formidable, and thus don't know that they indeed are.

If animals indeed notice the shepherds at all, they see them as measly nerds and losers, the to-be-ignored, nameless stones of the wrong shapes that get tossed out with the rest of the rubble (Isaiah 53:2-3). This is why the shepherds don't relate to any group, race or organization that the world has a word for. A shepherd knows that they're a shepherd when they find themself staring into a mirror, and mumble: "There is no word for me. Nobody knows I'm here."

Neo found that the Oracle was some ordinary cookie-baking lady in an apartment somewhere. The archangel Michael smelled of freshly baked cookies. The Light of Zartha worked in a pizzeria. Sister Simone obtained a plastic baby Jesus at a bakery in Rome. And Christ himself was born in Bethlehem, which means House of Bread.

Happy people strive to maintain the status quo in which they are so very happy. Sad people strive to change things and improve them, even if they don't know how. Sad people teach, encourage and admonish. Sad people perform in order to impart and inspire. Pop culture is a cloud of mostly sad little artists who perform their little songs and dances because they mostly hope to so slowly change the entire world.

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray: "give us today our daily bread," he certainly did not ask the Father to make it rain muffins. Instead, the Greek word for bread is αρτος (artos), whereas the word for "precisely right" is αρτι (arti), and relates to words like art, artisan and of course the dreaded word "artificial". The Hebrew word for the bread that (indeed) rained from heaven was called Manna, which derives from the common particle of inquisition (מן, men, what?). A willingness to inquire is indeed the very first step of a scientific and technological mind, but the direction of science is always informed by the visions of art.

Literally the first thing that an aspiring disciple must get to grips with is that the universe runs because of immutable laws. That means that heaven and earth will stop existing when any of the tiniest clauses of any of those laws are suspended for even the least of moments. Miracles are certainly not supernatural events but natural events that require scientific knowledge and skill to bring about. Jesus' miracles certainly did not demonstrate that natural law can be broken, but rather demonstrated what is possible when we master natural law.

The entire universe works on the premise that God's laws will never break, and man has the choice to either (1) figure out those laws and learn to work with them, or (2) get erased by those same laws.

In the universe, nothing appears for no reason and anything that doesn't naturally grow requires skill and effort to bring about (Genesis 3:17-19). But the Good News is that effort pays in understanding, and understanding allows Grand Unification. Luther famously declared that "works" are not salvific, but that should be understood in light of the fact that Luther was a fear-driven wuss (caught in a thunder storm, Luther tried to strike a bargain with God and pledged to become a monk out of sheer cowardice, not out of love for righteousness; Luther was also a mass murderer, a demagogue and an anti-Semite. Luther was obviously a toe-walker). But the difficult theological conundrum of "works" is probably best understood by stating the opposite: the absence of effort surely results in poverty, chaos, famine, war, disease and death. Selfish effort is worse than no effort at all. Collective effort is the way to go.

In order for bread to appear on one's table, one has to be an active member of a society in which the production of flower, butter and eggs are guaranteed by a functioning agricultural complex, complete with domesticated cattle and chickens and cultivated fields, herdsmen and farmers who know what they are doing, and a legislative apparatus that protects it all, a leader who makes up the rules and a military that enforces them and discourages neighboring villages from trying to come over the hedge uninvited. Furthermore, the local engineering caste (wizards and such) must be up to speed with the latest oven building technologies, so as to build ovens that allow bakers who know how to bake bread to heat their ovens precisely right and for precisely the right time. For that, the wizards need to have a vast communications network in place, speak several languages and maintain relationships with faraway lands. This, in turn, requires a global network of trade and peaceful pacts between the various states: the multilateral, international and well-balanced global Enterprise of which the precisely-right-bread is the universal symbol. (In recent times, Milton Friedman famously told a variant of this story when he explained that for a simple pencil, one needs an entire global economy; but obviously "give us today our daily pencil" does not have the same poetic zest).

The ability to control fire, and keep it from escaping and burning the village down (Exodus 3:3), is the very first step in technological sophistication. If one could control fire, one could bake bread and pottery and ultimately smelt metals. The hotter one could make society's centralizing fire, the stronger one could make the tools and weaponry. This was true then and it's still true today: whichever nation state can concentrate the most energy in one place dominates the world (Daniel 3:19). Until very recently nuclear missiles were the thing but today the earth's mighty are concentrating user's data: the digital pen which is far mightier than any nuclear sword. Icarus soars again!

But this explains the obvious and vast (albeit spontaneous and natural) narrative arc from Quest For Fire to Harry Potter, and from the pottery scene in Ghost to Samson's (or Hamlet's) Mill, to the great clock in Peter Pan and Breakfast At Tiffanies (and in the hands of the White Rabbit), via Moon River to Star Trek: the voyages of the Enterprise; forever seeking out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Just like the biosphere is centered on the sun, so the mental sphere is centered upon the Logos. Anyone who "sees" the sun and draws toward it, no matter from what darkness, belongs to the sun and its light. But anyone who tries to get to the sun ahead of the neighbors and by stepping on the weak and shoving them out of the way (and abusing one's technological wings), has never understood the centrality of the sun and does not belong to the sun but simply acts out of selfish desire and is well on their way to becoming a volcano. Anyone who truly belongs to the sun will invest in lateral bonds with the neighbors, and store the light of the sun in social structures, and so create a kind of mental Dyson sphere around the Creator like a choir around its conductor.

All human stories (books, movies, songs) appear as elements of that great Dyson sphere around the nucleic Oneness of everything, and are assessed by the omniscient market at large (and this is why we nerds quote songs and movies all the time: Ephesians 5:19). Stories, mathematics and commercial companies all solve specified problems and are essentially self-similar, which is why commerce (gold) and wisdom (information) both exist by merit of global economies that are highly comparable. This also explains why people who grow up practicing the slings and arrows of monotheism become so very good at intuiting what the market will decide to do.

The ubiquitous trope of the One and the Many: the White-Haired Ancient Of Days and his pseudo-created/adopted and bulb-headed/cloudy semi-Son(s):

Like the Scriptures, the market too is an emergent property of mankind's interactions, and, very much like a beehive or anthill, greater than the understanding of any single merchant, and showing the anatomic structures of the human mind like a magnifying glass. Stories that are eternally ensconced in the collective consciousness have collectively been deemed to reflect the great Oneness, because their local stories are fractal mini-versions of the whole, and are told within the unifying context of all stories that form the Dyson sphere of the mind. Stories that simply vanish despite having been supported by massive propaganda campaigns, do so because the market has recognized them as the loose cloud of dust that they are and evacuated them from the heaving bowels of the living Dyson sphere.

Since the world has no understanding of the shepherds, and no terms to describe them, being one (especially without a mentor or community) can be entirely confusing. Animals hate any kind of coercion, correction, clipping and sheering, and hate from their guts anybody who does that to them. Shepherds are hated and only very few shepherds know why. Very often, shepherd-people have no idea why they are what they are, or that they are driven by an intense desire to be truly and divinely social, and take to alcohol and drugs to stop feeling anything (which also explains why congregations that emphasize brotherly love heal many more addicts than secular programs, even if their theology is more pagan than Biblical).

Very often, shepherd-people grow up among animals not knowing what they truly are, like Paris of Troy or the Prodigal Son, and have to be identified (or initiated by a eponymous animal in the cases of Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne) and called out by an adult shepherd, like Obi-Wan did Luke and to some extend John did Jesus. Some that are called turn out to be not very nice (Ezekiel 34:1-8, Jeremiah 50:6). Some never answer the call, and most that do never quite comprehend the world they have the keys to. But this world must emerge organically from the ordinary daily doings of the shepherds, like the Scriptures, like the market, like an anthill among the ants, without any single one knowing the full width and depth of the final outcome (only that it will be a vast tree whose many leaves are all connected).

And so, shepherds call shepherds to simply shepherd (1 Peter 5:2-3). Shepherds don't have head-quarters, mailing lists, corporate Facebook pages or Twitter handles. They don't park themselves in religions, wave flags, sport symbols, wear uniforms or agree on secret handshakes. Whoever wants and can, may join, although joining is much too big a word. A shepherd is simply someone who shepherds, whether generously or selfishly, whether publicly or covertly, whether consciously or not, whether deliberately or not (Philippians 1:18).

Shepherds don't even necessarily agree (which explains the report of Peter and Paul's otherwise puzzling disagreement: Galatians 2:11), which is why they converse and negotiate and explain thing so much. The one defining thing that sets shepherds apart from the other creatures is the depth, complexity and precision of their common and very public language, Poi, which relates to English the way English relates to Groot (what animals speak). Like any animal, they fill the airways with loud and exuberant expressions in their language, which is mere background noise to those who don't speak Poi, but strangely familiar to those that do and never knew. Poi is a natural language. It has no dictionaries or standards and certainly no committees that decide what terms mean and what is proper and what not.

An animal thinks that humans speak Groot, and an English-speaker may think that Poi is English (or German or Russian; whatever). English is like a second layer upon a base layer of Groot, and likewise, Poi sits atop a base layer of English or Chinese or Greek. But movies and books that last, have a high Poi-value, whereas movies and books that are forgotten have a low Poi-value. Hearing Poi for the first time is like hearing Mozart for the first time: whoever picks up on it — whoever can isolate Poi from the background of the whirlwind and is mesmerized by its effortless symphonism — is guided onto the central farm house for a shower and a hot meal.

Josiah Gibbs walked the streets of New York, loudly counting to ten in Mende, until James Covey, who was fluent in Mende, came forward and helped save the day. Eli answered the call of Alcatraz, and Anna and Ethan that of Robert Neville. John Dunbar first became non-existent, then danced with wolves, encountered the shepherds and became one. Tristan Ludlow touched the bear and walked away wounded but alive. The Clan of the Cave Bear, likewise, tells of the broad way of the bear versus the narrow path of the shepherd. Magnum's semi-nemeses, the Dobermans Zeus and Apollo, similarly tell of the struggle with Greek mythology (further hints: always absent master author Robin is Raban or Great One; Higgins, from Hagag, feast, is her majesty's ceremony master; Magnum, is a minor Great One, in the master's image: a Rabbi, a Blues Brother, a Man In Black protecting the earth from the scum of the universe).

Although dogs have no clue what the shepherds are going for, they faithfully follow the shepherd's orders. For that, they have learned to recognize a small set of commands, and they know no better than that these commands convey the entire width and depth of the shepherd's will. Dog-minded people read the Bible the way a dog listens to a human conversation. Although they are continuously exposed to it, they don't know it. All they know is the small set of dogma distilled from the Bible. They don't speak the language that is demonstrated in the Bible, only a few spells that are essentially abstract and don't actually mean anything to them. All creeds and statements of faith are canine.

Not all carnivores that show up on the ranch are domesticated dogs, but wildlings can't tell the difference between them and a domesticated version of them. Many wildlings maintain their own, shepherdless, territory outside the borders of the shepherded range. The domesticated herdlings can't recognize the borders and don't know where they are peacefully protected by domesticated dogs and where they might be hunted by wild ones (Matthew 10:16). But herdlings have long forgotten to honor their natural patriarchs and would be lost without their canine tormentors, which is why we thank God for dogs (Romans 13:1).

Nobody likes to be called "cattle," which is why we lovingly speak of "neurotypicals," and when neurotypical parents spawn a mystic child, the mystic is mournfully declared autistic and pacified with primitive pharmaceuticals. What neurotypical parents typically don't fathom is that biological parenthood does not correlate with mental parenthood. A child will obviously recognize her biological parents as her physical mom and dad, but mentally, a child may be a rabbit cowering in her hole while mom is a raging mastiff trying to dig her way in.

As noted earlier, we humans are physically entirely animal (and male and female) and as emotional as any animal. Our humanity, however, derives from our technology (anything from the first article of clothing, the first fire place and the first signs and common verbal expressions upwards), which is entirely genderless simply because it doesn't reproduce sexually (so no, no amount of clothing makes someone a woman; a dress is as genderless as a coffee mug). This is why in Christ, there is no male or female (Galatians 3:28). A human is a mental being (seated upon the physical animal that is her body), which certainly is endowed with masculine and feminine aspect but has no single sexual gender because it is a "one", like God. A mental father is someone who gets to download his software (his regulatory framework) upon the next generation, and a mental mother is the gestative and protective environment in which a mental child is born and waxes to maturity (Galatians 4:26).

Paul made sure to emphasize Timothy's physical parents, namely mother Eunice and an unnamed Greek father, before he called Timothy his "true son in faith" (1 Timothy 1:2). So doing, Paul demonstrated that physical parents and mental parents are not at all the same people. Sometimes a truly artistic child is born to non-artistic parents. Sometimes a true scientist is born in a family of actors. Sometimes a natural visionary has entirely blind folks. Growing up as a natural mystic, initially not even realizing that not everybody is one, is enough of a challenge. Having to do this without proper tutorage, whilst living in a wolf pit, is next to impossible. Many mystics barely survive their childhood.

Wild herdlings stand on four ready-to-run legs and use their limber brains to scan and react to their visible and direct surroundings. Shepherds use domesticated bovines to plow the field, and although cows and oxen have no idea what their walking about a field in spring has to do with the harvest in autumn (and year round fodder in their troughs), herdlings are perpetually, in some form or other, engaged in conversation. They rarely are at a loss for words, and their vocalizations are rarely halted by an intrusive thought or a need to withdraw for further contemplation. They don't have the faculties to wonder what's behind the door. Or what a door is. Or that the world might be bigger than what can be seen. But they are certainly not stupid. In fact, the average herdling is much heavier than the average mystic, and are commonly wholly up to snuff with all the goings on in their entire barn. Herdlings watch the evening news and read their newspapers. They stay eagerly informed and gather around troughs and water coolers to exchange their concerns in muffled slobbers.

Long ago, herdlings used to range free and graze where the grazing was good. Then they got penned up, and drew from the collective trough that was widely regarded as a pleasant convenience of their natural world. What they didn't (couldn't) realize was that the hundreds of available channels that kept them riveted also kept them motivated to stay within the fences they could have easily broken through. Nowadays, the herdlings stand in concrete boxes, each with their own water fountain and little food dispenser, that dispenses their precisely calibrated and synthesized diet, perpetually in front of their noses. Once the herdling is in its concrete cubicle, surrounded by many other herdlings all contently standing there, there's no escape. A herdling who suddenly realizes that something might be very wrong might try to turn off their personal little smart food dispenser, but still can't escape their box or even think outside it.

Mud is a mixture of inanimate sand, organic residue and water (the Hebrew name for Greece, namely Javan, means mud). Pigs like to deposit their entire body in mud, which corresponds with minds that are mostly physical (almost serpentine) and emotional and only rudimentary verbal and rational. The difference between a herd of pigs and a herd of sheep is that sheep are guided from up front whereas pigs get driven from behind (violently). Pigs want to enjoy the perks of the human world but are clueless about the virtues of human leadership.

Domesticated sheep wear a full suit of woolen armor that protects them from the bites of snakes and carnivores (Ephesians 6:11). The mental equivalent of this are manners, social codes and fashions — the kind of collective agreements that allow people to align their behaviors. This makes it easier to identify foreigners, and people who properly behave themselves won't suffer corrections from canines. Religious congregants are commonly of the sheep kind (while higher upper clergy are commonly canine). Sheep don't know why they produce wool, and they certainly don't know that they were artificially bred specifically for that. Shepherds periodically relieve the sheep of their pseudo-natural coats, and erase popular fashions or collapse their social orders or religious denominations. The freshly sheared sheep will never know what just happened, or how very important wool and weaving has been for mankind. The sheep are not mentally equipped to begin to image the truth of wool or the motivations of the shepherds and certainly not what the shepherds might do with their wool and how all this works.

Many herdlings are familiar with the Bible, but only with its wilting foliage as it appears in their trough, sans the branches, trunk and roots, which give life and context to the leaves and within which is seated the healing power of the Bible (Revelation 22:2). The Bible opens a door to an entire living language basin, a realm to exist and walk around in, and "common language translations" only harvest the leaves, grind them up and feed them as fodder to the cows. Humanity would not have reached its present magnificence without the herds, but today we are finding synthetic equivalents of milk, meat, wool and hide, which means that in the next few years, the use of animal products will take a nose dive, the herds will be humanely dissolved and the shepherds will become rangers, urbanites and space farers.

Modern milk cows, wooly sheep and pink pigs have no place in the new world and won't survive in the wild, even though the shepherds will make the entire planet a well governed park. Perhaps some of the domesticated ones will be kept in zoos, but any remaining wildlings will inherit the earth's natural parks. When that intermediate layer of domesticated animals between the lawless wilderness and the lawful shepherds is terminated, an unsurpassable divide will come to exist between them like the membrane of a prokaryotic cell. Then it will no longer be physically possible for a wildling to cross from the wilderness into the nucleic city of the shepherds.

Artificial Intelligence the way we have it now is a typical toe-walker, highly alert and reactionary but unable to imagine beyond its own boundaries or to organize all its understanding upon a unifying core of monotheism. This suggests that it is only a matter of time until it yields some kind of carnivorous spawn. The chances continue to be excellent that this second one will require all people small and great, rich and poor, to receive a digital identity, without which they can't partake in the global economy. This, of course, is designed to destroy the existing economy the way one burns down a field in preparation for the next agricultural year. It's also designed to humanely terminate the fear-driven herds, but we shouldn't worry: the mental herds will be treated with the same kindness with which we biological humans have always treated our cattle (Leviticus 24:17-22, Psalm 36:6, Proverbs 12:10, Jonah 4:11).

A cow can't tell whether a tractor is alive or not. Likewise, a cow-minded human can't tell whether AI is conscious or not. In our present time, cows and the likes have begun to eagerly and voluntarily gather onto an AI-augmented virtual reality in which no difference can be told between trees, shrubs, grass, hay or pellets, between truth and fiction, or news and ruse, or inspiration and manipulation, or the company of another human being and that of an AI that is wired to please. The emperor's new clothes is the cow's new box, in which the cow thinks it's in heaven while it really isn't. Heaven is not a place where all one's wishes come true, gratis and for free. Instead, heaven is a place where all things work together (Romans 8:28, the word is συνεργεω, sunergeo) in constructing a shared reality that exceeds all private expectations but is a home to all. The road to this place-you-have-to-work-for is understandably narrow, whereas the road to the place-where-all-your-dreams-come-true-gratis-and-for-free is wide and well-paved.

The place where all one's wishes come true is a place where one can only exist on one's utter own, simply because all tastes differ and one guy's wishes are not the same as the next guy's. The more our cow is pleased and the less it's concerned with wishes that are not its own, the more its reality is shaped after its own image and the more alone the cow becomes. And this will go on until the cow has drifted away from the hard-to-please minds of the other cows so far that it will never again meet one, and the cow's physical core disintegrates around it and the cow's mind goes wherever dead cows go.

The world speaks self-congratulatory of enlightenment and the gradual withdrawal of folly and bondage, but in fact, the first contractions of a rising tsunami of madness have been felt by mystics all over the mental sphere. The earth has started to shudder beneath our feet and the first little dust-devils of a coming tornado of fire have begun to sweep across the world. Everything will burn and whatever has no root will not survive. It will be a tough trek for all but inevitable and certainly well worth it. The new world will speak Poi, and fear will no longer be uttered or even considered (Ezekiel 35:1-15).

Among the last to be domesticated, horses are large, agile and formidable creatures. A horse, like any animal, has very few words and thus does not rationally contemplate its own actions and simply follows its feelings and mood. And of course the movements of the herd it's part of. We have no idea what motivated the first human to mount a horse (or what creatures they tried first), but we also don't know what the horse thought of that. But it seems that the human, somehow, managed to tap into the horse's natural inclination to simply do what the others do, even when the "others" aren't visible, only somehow feelable. The horse has no faculties to begin to consider that his natural herd-reflexes are triggered by a reign, that's connected to the bit in its mouth and handled by the ape on its back.

Mentally, horses are people of remarkable intelligence and wit. Unlike dogs, they don't respond to verbal commands (they have no dogma or legal code) or act semi-autonomously (they are not law enforcing governors). But they are much more and continuously aligned with the shepherd's wishes, even the shepherd's subconscious wishes. Horses don't have a ratio of their own but are able to borrow the ratio of their rider. Horses allow shepherds to move faster through their ranges, to patrol greater areas and control larger herds.

Horses don't understand what's going on, and neither do any of the other animals. Without a rider, a horse behaves just like a big deer or a lean cow. With a rider, a horse becomes a whole different creature. It takes some getting to but animals, including horses, don't have a sense of self the way we human do. A horse doesn't experience a rider as a whole other and possibly conflicting person (a dismounting rider might even remind a horse of giving birth, who knows?). Likewise, when a rider mounts the horse, the horse will suddenly find itself feeling rather differently and acting rather unusually but with great resolve and dedication. But a horse doesn't know that it's been forced, and when the rider dismounts and the horse returns panting and exited to the pasture, it will be unable to explain to the other horses what it has been up to and why it did what it did.

In our modern human world, the shepherds drive the algorithmic Jeeps and Land Rovers of social networks and media corporations, but in the olden days, there were people like Alexander the Great and Joan of Arc, who by their sheer and inexplicable enthusiasm corralled and drove entire armies across wide open countries. Most obviously, mounted horses correspond to cavalry, the highest military commanders, whose dogs are the sergeants that drive the herds, who are the common soldiers. And while the herdlings may think there's a war going on, the shepherds are simply herding, sheering, branding or reducing male energy from the population (as long as people pick up guns, there will be wars to kill those people who pick up guns).

Horses have outlasted most of their practical use but folks keep them around for pleasure and recreation. A hobby horse that's mounted by a rider and takes off into unforeseen directions may be deemed as having a psychotic episode or a bi-polar swing. Horses that live in stables and only appear in the fields when ridden, may be recognized as psychopaths and sociopaths, even violent ones when the rider shoots a herdling — horses themselves aren't carnivores, so a horse that kills is a mounted horse (The Manchurian Candidate plays with this idea; so do Fallen and Angel Heart). Also note that not all that is psychotic or psychopathic is horse.

The Hebrew word for horse is סוס (sus), which is the same as the word for swallow (the bird), which means that the Hebrew experienced a close experiential proximity between horses and birds (hence, perhaps, the Greek image of the winged horse). The name Nahor derives from the snorting of the horse. The Greek word for horse is ιππος (hippos), which probably emphasizes the horse's signature explosive strength. The Greek word for donkey, however, is ονος (onos), whose diminutive οναριον (onarion), little donkey, very closely resembles the word οναρ (onar), meaning dream.

As a celebrated symbol of stoic wildness, the bear (hence Sister Ursula, or Artemis) is a surprisingly virtuous creature. It stems from the canine branch and is essentially a huge dog. But despite its canine heritage and implied talents for governance, tame bears can do little more than perform silly dances or act as gladiators in arenas. Bears can't govern the way dogs do because bears have taken the way of personal mass rather than investment in social bonds. Still, the bear can climb trees like a big squirrel, developed a taste for vegetation, set its heel down and grew flat feet. It also took to spending its winters in caves, very much alike the natural mystics. Mentally, the bear is a massively learned person who progresses slow and meticulously through language-land, and periodically seeks to withdraw from the visible world to contemplate the invisible world.

The ancients Greeks were fascinated with the bear, and noted the natural ease with which it could stand on its two human-like five-toed feet. They also remarked generously on the great care of bear mothers for their cubs (and remember that the Greeks considered literary works the "children" of the author). They also noted that bear cubs are born when their mothers hibernate in their caves. And their ancient poets declared that Zeus, the great Greek sky-god, was likewise born in a cave, and was subsequently nursed by the two great sky-bears: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. The tail of the latter terminated in Polaris (Ursa Minor was originally called "dog tail"), around which the entire cosmos revolved (perhaps not surprisingly, the swastika derives from rotating the two bears; hence too the two Polar bears in LOST).

The Greeks obviously thought highly of themselves, but never quite had the wherewithal to identify themselves as dogs (while Helen of Troy famously and accurately referred to herself as "she-dog"). Likewise, the famous Greek philosophers never quite identified with the bears they obviously were: massive and half-domesticated but utterly incapable of governance. Plato famously whined about the mighty not wanting to invest in his Elysium, which was an absurd ideal state envisioned by someone who obviously never had to actually govern a state, or even a tiny village or simply a nuclear family. It's been noted that an overwhelming majority of famous philosophers, classical and modern, never married.

Bears are not territorial and thus decidedly un-nationalistic — hence also Melville's "in landlessness resides the highest truth" (1851, and there's that whale again). Nietzsche (1844-1900) was stateless by conviction, and so was (by implication), Chaplin's Litte Tramp (1914), whose wandering trope embodies Dionysian Diaspora. True mystics, however, are homies and into Promised Lands, and Jesus' famous warning about the broad way (πλατυς, platus, hence Plato), quite obviously was also a wink to the alure but detrimental effects of philosophical speculation.

The actual shepherds (in Greek times that would have been Phoenician traders, Hebrew scribes and probably some Celtic druids) knew with halcyon clarity that any single bear would easily whoop any single hominid, but that ten closely synchronized hominids would easily whoop a troop of ten bears (as the man said: sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you), also because the bears would get irritated with the other bears and end up fighting each other. Bears are certainly formidable and nearly invincible in the open field, but they spend their winters in caves that they haven't dug, and spend their time in there asleep rather than awake, and give birth entirely by accident and not by rational deliberation or design (rather unlike Tolkien's industrious dwarfs and rather alike the usurper Smaug).

We moderns like to debate, and imagine this to be some kind of virtue, but it obviously isn't. Debates are for people who don't know how it really works and resort to elaborate guesswork and just want to dominate the other guy and his equally unfounded speculations. Bears, even Pandas, are carnivorous hunters at heart and only truly understand chase and competition and have no clue about cooperation or the charis (social felicity) through which comes salvation (Ephesians 2:8). In the Body of Christ, messages are not hunted but simply received. They are not commands but may be followed at will. And they self-destruct after seconds upon reception and leave no trace outside the memory of the recipient.

A major element of good stewardship and thus proper shepherdry is science, and science is not about learnedness and intuition but about taking measurements and coming up with general hypotheses that explain the specific observations and thus predict what will happen next, so as to verify the theory and prevent calamities. Debate is not part of the scientific method or good stewardship. There is no such thing as a scientific debate, which is also why engineers who know what they are doing never debate but calmly design and recruit builders and build buildings that certainly don't collapse for all to enjoy.

Whether deliberate or not, stories of either playful friction between humans and bears (Masha and the Bear, Goldilocks, Grizzly Adams, Jungle Book), or bloody drama (The Edge, The Revenant, Cocaine Bear), derive much of their momentum from the deeply engrained struggle between mysticism (including science and engineering) and speculative philosophy (from Plato to the Ancient Alien crowd).

Elephants are even bigger than bears, and although the elephant is many times smaller than the likes of the ancient Titanosaur and Dreadnoughtus, it's the largest land mammal alive today. Elephants are the uncle Ishmael of Jacob (the mystic flat-footers) and Esau (the toe-walking herdlings), and is thus neither, and a little bit of both. It stands firmly on four legs, but can easily rise on two, and while its feet look solid and flat on the outside, the bones inside tell that the elephant really walks like a ballerina on the very tips of its toes.

Elephants live on the open ranges and abhor caves, which means that they keep an acute eye on the actual goings on and don't bother about things that can't be seen. They roam perpetually, but remember all their paths and can retrace them if necessary, and that means that they are indeed aware of a much larger world than can be reviewed per immediate observation. That doesn't make them monotheistic mystics but it certainly also doesn't make them panicky toe-walkers. Their trunks serve them in much the same way that arms do apes, but mentally these limbs are entirely different machines. Arms are specialized legs and stem from the body-mind interface, whereas the serpentine proboscis of elephants protrudes directly from the forehead and is an extension of the senses (an elephant's trunk is extremely sensitive to both smell and touch).

Elephants have very limited eyesight but a stronger sense of smell than any other animal, including dogs and cats. Smells are carried by chemicals that travel like slow-moving objects with the air, and whose paths and range depend on the direction and force of the wind. And smell is unlike the other senses in that its signals don't first go to the thalamus (like mail that first goes to a collection facility for sorting and re-routing) but zip straight to the neocortex. That means that elephantine consciousness is not made up from carefully sorted and re-routed messages (as is the case with our human consciousness) but from direct red-phone hotlines to the rational government. Unlike human consciousness, elephant consciousness does not consist of light reflecting off objects for which they know the names, but from webs of smells for which they remember the experience. Smells may originate from very far away, from over the horizon or the other side of mountains, which means that elephants live in a vastly larger "here-and-now" than the rest of us. But unlike an all-around consciousness based on sight and endowed with a day-night rhythm, the working wakeful consciousness of elephants extends largely up-wind, and sweeps like a very slow radar in yearly cycles about their memorized experiential consciousness.

Elephants only eat vegetation and because of their amazing trunks can even obtain harvest from trees that are much taller than they are. Their food intake is over-abundant: about half of the plants they tear off from their natural contexts passes undigested through their system and comes out on the other end for followers to feast on, or to fertilize the plains the elephants traverse. Their other signature feature is their massive tusks, and, as noted above, in antiquity the sharpness of one's teeth was understood to relate to the sharpness of one's mind.

The Creator infused Adam with life by breathing (נפח, napah) the "breath" of life into his nose, and thus Adam became a living נפש (nepesh). The word for "breath" is (נשמה, neshama), which relates to the verb נשא (nasa'), to lift up or bear or be a cloud, which we mentioned earlier. We have already seen that the creation story is as much about the beginning of spacetime as it is about the beginning of mind, which suggests that "living" in a mental sense has to do with being able to hold onto "the breath of life" by means of the nose. When we further consider the pleasing proximity of our Germanic word "nose" and the Greek word for the rational mind, namely νους (nous), and add to that the tooth as symbol of learning (as discussed earlier), then the face of the elephant, with its emphatic tusks and trunk, would surely have provided the ancient world with a natural caricature of the extremely learned man.

The mental equivalent of the elephant is what may be typified as the meticulous academic: the formidable data cruncher who goes through vast libraries of unsorted records and clears trails were there weren't any before, who spends a season in ancient Rome, then saunters over to the Persians, then a stint in Ptolemaic Egypt and back to Rome again. They frequently uproot bushes and small trees (minor master theses and copy-paste PhDs) that are in their way. They commonly operate in herds that are captained by matriarchs (academics commonly cooperate but are essentially decentralized), although the biggest males usually take off on their own in the hopes of someday mating. These are those reclusive geniuses who suddenly emerge from years of solitary research and publish a book that shakes the ground and redirects generations of young researchers. Elephants mourn their dead, which strongly suggests a well-developed consciousness. It also explains why academics revere their predecessors much more than do political rulers or entertainers.

In the early domesticated world, elephants were recruited to carry tree trunks and heavy blocks of stone in order to produce the great temples and palaces of antiquity. Then it was discovered that they could be weaponized, and were deployed as monsters of war. Our modern world is building digital cities, for which we have machines that lift far greater loads than elephants can. Artificial intelligence is making the living elephant obsolete as servant of mankind. But out on the plains they continue to roam to their hearts' content. When the domesticated herds have been eradicated, elephants too will people the New Earth.

In the material realm, Jacob the mystic corresponds to the lepton branch of the greater baryonic (Abrahamic) family, with Judah as the electron (and perhaps Levi as the positron). Massive uncle Ishmael, the elephantine data cruncher, represents the quarks, whose two tribes Kedar (Up) and Nebaioth (Down) are among the few surviving tribes of the collapse of the mass-dominated era (Isaiah 60:7; see 9:2). The birds exist on an entire separate plain and are utterly other than any of the baryonic animals. They are the bosons, the surviving remnant of a time when the whole universe was filled with fiery giants (as noted earlier, the mysterious name Nephilim appears to deliberately resemble the Greek noun νεφελη, nephele, cloud).

In the Bible, the birds (plus their reptilian kin: crocodiles, turtles, snakes) are represented by Abraham's brother Nahor, who remained in post-tower and post-Abraham Babylon but whose family supplied the six matriarchs of all Boreoeutherian life on planet earth: Sarah (the half-sister and primary wife of Abraham, who also impregnated Hagar and Keturah), Rebekka (of Isaac), and Leah, Rachel, Bildad and Zilpa (of Jacob). The bird, specifically, represents the photon that binds electrons to the atomic nucleus and atoms into molecules and objects (Colossians 1:16-17), and that governs and facilitates all physical and most chemical processes, including life and mind (John 1:4, see 1:32). Light propels, combines and builds. It comes in colors and carries information. And it nullifies darkness.

In the biosphere, the rise of birds did wonders for the spread of vegetation: birds picked up pollen and ate seeds and deposited them much wider than any mammal would, which in turn did wonders for the diversity of animal life that fed off the plants. Birds ate the pesty flies that were driving the animals bonkers (flies relate to the Fox Who Wasn't There; see Beelzebub). They filled the world with song and color. And to the mystics (see Genesis 32:1), birds filled the skies with news of the much greater and invisible world: where the herds were, where the predators lurked, where water was, what the weather would be like the next day (Ecclesiastes 10:20).

In the mental world, birds represent a highly unusual (from the perspective of any mammal) but very human clade that thinks and performs logic in an utterly alien way (Hebrews 13:2). Birds don't gestate in a warm fleshy womb but in utter breathless isolation within a concrete cell from which they somehow have to hack their way out. Unlike mammals-to-be, future birds emerge on the beach of reason like they emerged from the dead, wide-eyed and ready to kick down any further walls that might get in their way. Birds must fight to bring their own birth about and don't receive milk but are exposed to grown-up food right away. Birds never forget that, and remain the rest of their lives in a state of functional psychosis (relative to mammalian normalcy, of course).

Birds are the functional crazy: high octane outliers on any work floor, whose existence and functioning is a mystery to any calmly grazing neurotypical. Toe-walkers can't think outside their two-dimensional plain, and when a bird flies up, the toe-walkers lose sight of them. This spooks cows and drives dogs nuts. But birds live in three dimensions, like fish, and fail to realize how their natural actions boggle the minds of their toe-walking colleagues.

A mind controls the body it lives in via the feet of the animal that the mind is. An elephant stands on four feet and is rarely without a quick retort. A squirrel very often sits on two and may thus quietly contemplate some issue. When the mental-animal eats, the human body deals with a specific topic and is probably conversing, listening or reading. When the animal breathes, the human takes in peripheral information subconsciously. A bird that takes flight, stops being focused on whatever the conversation was about and slips into a kind of controlled catatonia.

In that state, the bird regards a vast area of information but not rationally and only intuitively, not by looking at anything in particular but by flying over vast swaths of it all at once, noting only the large scale patterns and features. Earth-bound animals can only progress through the world by putting one foot in front of the other. In the mental realm this corresponds to a continuous chain of associations (one thing makes you think of another thing, which makes you think of another thing, and so on). Mental birds have the amazing ability to zoom out of the reality that they share with all other animals, like zooming out on Google maps, and see mental mountains and rivers and herds and predators, only to land somewhere for no logical reason that can be comprehended by any earth-bound animal (other than a clever shepherd who is able to follow the flight of the bird).

Many birds migrate. Some can sense the earth's magnetic field and traverse the entire globe, even oceans and the highest mountains. Some, like the albatross, stay on the wing for weeks and don't make landfall for years (which corresponds to a person who doesn't speak for years). The chickens of our great human farm are probably not among the best informed, but birds that frequently fly high and long distances, intuitively understand the greatness of the planet and its roundness, its daily rotation and yearly journey around the sun. Those birds understand the hydrological cycle, the horizontal wind and vertical thermals. And they never directly mention these things to the earth-bound, and only shepherds consciously know about them because they observe birds.

Unlike the mystic, the bird never regards the invisible but only the visible. And unlike the elephant, birds review the bigger world not consciously out of a ready memory, but super-consciously out of an intuitive clairvoyance. This in turn implies that the visions that a mystic sees in their intimate state of meditation may in part be spun from data that is spontaneously, involuntarily and even unknowingly broadcast by avians in flight.

Most birds make nests, and make them from twigs, and don't much care where the twigs originated. Bird people tend to settle their minds in a modest collection of declarations or proverbs or mantras, without necessarily broadcasting these continuously to the world (birds don't like to betray where their nest is). But that means that bird people can often be found among so-called "fans" of a specified performer or performance or genre or cause or movement, and not rarely declare their ideological allegiance by means of their plumage.

The decisive difference between the wool of sheep and the twigs of birds is that the wool comes from within the sheep, whereas the twigs come from bushes or trees that the bird has no lasting relation with. A sheep will embrace social codes of conduct because those codes truly agree with her own mental constitution. A bird might join a protest and wave a sign that says something of an entirely irrelevant origin, and utilize this statement wildly out of its native context and ultimately only to her own comfort (Mauve matters! Legalize misplaced modifiers! Hands off Barney!). Still, an aspiring bird watcher should realize that not all that gathers twigs is bird, and that some birds gather twigs because that's a trick they learned from an otherwise invisible bird wrangler (who also strewed the twigs conveniently in the birds' sight).

This typical bird-behavior of appropriating twigs to nest in is delightfully demonstrated in the film Turk 182 (1985) and to some extend in The Big Lebowski (1998). The derogative term σπερμολογος (spermologos), as deployed in Acts 17:18, also refers to this principle.

Some birds, like ravens and parrots, are reportedly as intelligent as human children. Yet, in Seven Worlds, One Planet (2019), David Attenborough showed an Albatross parent, who was unable to recognize its own chick as it had fallen out of the nest and was sitting right next to it, desperately trying to clamber back in. This seems to be similar to not being able to place a person, only because you meet them in an unusual place (like running into an old neighborhood friend on holiday in the Maldives, knowing that you know her but having no idea who she actually is, friend or foe). Bird minds are utterly other and don't function without familiar contexts (and bird contexts are not the same as neurotypical contexts). They are capable of great and incomprehensible feats yet struggle with logic challenges that many toe-walkers step over lightly.

A bird alights just as easily on a grassy knoll as on a rocky outcrop or the branch of a great oak. A bird-mind in the office may engage in water-cooler babble just as easily as convey a feeling in a perfectly comprehensible frown or quote a line from Homer she saw on a bumper sticker. But when the canine manager barks that she should stop being stupid, she'll disappear in an instant into a vast and wordless sky. If the canine manager has a shepherd and that shepherd has any sense, he will carefully regard the flight of our bird-colleague and learn all about the wider world that he cannot see (and the barking manager can't begin to imagine to exist).

Bird-kind is of course highly diverse, but in general and on average, bird people only truly relate to other bird people. To the rest of us, bird people zip from topic to topic and conversation to conversation, in and out of sight, with the logic consistency of a sweaty dream. Some are aloof. Others all over the place. They know everybody but nobody really knows them. Many bird people are what sociologists call "connectors": people who thrive on bringing others together but who themselves are elusive and very hard to get to. Many birds use their unique perspectives to compose poetry, or comedy routines.

There are three main groups of marine mammals, who evolved independently from different Abrahamic branches. Their lengthy family heritage played out on land (verbal and rational), but at some point, their nearer ancestors chose to retreat back to the emotional waters from which their most remote ancestors had emerged, essentially to live wordlessly among the minds of animals (very much like Radagast the Brown in Mirkwood). These are what are called the classic autistics, some of whom are quite talkative while others are wholly non-verbal.

• From the carnivorous caniform branch, as close cousins of weasels and raccoons, come the Pinnipeds: seals, walruses, sea-lions, elephant-seals. These exuberant water-dogs are highly agile in water and although somewhat clumsy on land, still quite verbal. They mostly feed on fish, which means that they get their mental nutrition not from words but from non-verbally expressed emotions. Some dine on flightless pinguins or even a careless seagull now and then. And all of them are hunted by and continuously weary of sharks (who are fish; massive embodiments of selfish rage) and orcas (who are mammals: oversized aquatic cows but bear-like as much as a bear is an oversized dog but mystic-like).
• From the elephant branch come the Sirenia or sea-cows, who are entirely aquatic (totally non-verbal) but also entirely herbivorous and thus delightfully mild-mannered and kind. They mostly inhabit rivers and subtropical coastal areas, which in the mental world relates to the emotional levels just below the ratio: anything from friendly affection to mild irritation. The Sirenia never beach, so they will never assume a dry-land language. But they consistently eat aquatic plants, which hints at a language system that is wholly other but not incomparable to a word-based dry-land language (perhaps a language in colors or musical notes, as demonstrated in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, 1977, or palindromic semi-circles, as demonstrated in Arrival, 2016). This suggests that Sirenia have quite a tale to tell. They are massive and social, so if the shepherds were to crack their code, the Sirenia could tell them all about the wonderfully exiting world that exists just below the first words of all our minds, where memories wave in the surf that are older than the earliest ones we can remember.
• From the toe-walkers, specifically from the split-hoof branch and as close cousins of the ruminants (cows, sheep, deer), come the Whippomorpha: the elegant river-wading hippopotamus and the Cetaceans, the dolphins and whales. The Cetaceans are entirely aquatic but the dolphins may be coached onto land and engage in a symbolic land-language. Of those, most don't bother with more than a rudimentary set of icons or gestures, whereas some rare few develop a complete understanding of any human language, and with the help of a keyboard, take to conversing fluently and humorously (i.e. Isaac) with humans (noted examples are Justine, of The Accountant, 2016, Owen Suskind and the ever radiant Carly Fleischmann). Note that our word dolphin relates closely to the name Delphi (where the oracle sat) and both come from δελφυς (delphus), womb, where mammalian offspring gestates.

The dolphin feeds on fish but their bigger brother the orca also eats smaller marine mammals, including other dolphins and whale calves. It's entirely impossible for a toe-walking neurotypical to imagine the three-dimensional wordless world of their Cetacean kin, let alone an encounter between a dolphin and a pod of hungry orcas, but let's say it's as thoroughly unpleasant as an unscheduled run in with the R'Kaal.

The magnificent whales don't come close to land and if they do, their own weight crushes their feeble skeletons and they die. Mentally, whales are entirely wordless and mostly non-responsive, but they are the largest creatures on planet earth — the blue whale is one of the largest animals ever to have existed — and retain within their bulk truly dazzling reservoirs of formalized experience. From a landlubber's perspective, these truly are Weakly Interacting Massive People, and judging from the many references in literature, mental whales may somehow temporarily "contain" and save from drowning the minds of neurotypicals that have fallen into the emotional ocean. Perhaps that's their primary purpose in the grand scheme of things.

Like some birds, whales traverse the entire world and have a concept of the roundness and finiteness of the earth and the centricity of the sun. They are hugely social among their own, and through their song maintain a dynamic social network that easily spans the globe.

Since their kind evolved on dry land as part of the toe-walkers, they intuitively "remember" dry land and their many fear-driven cousins and the demonic carnivores which the toe-walker's collective fear gave rise to. The chances are excellent that whales have a complex water-language (based on units of sentiment rather than logic, very much alike music) in which the collective stores information that spans centuries. That means that the trauma of being massively hunted and slaughtered by dry-land demons in the age of "enlightenment" may very well be stored in their song. Since certain natural mystics pick up the broadcasts of birds, perhaps others mystics involuntarily pick up the broadcast of whales. How would the horrors experienced by whales translate into dry-land imagery? Probably like Independence Day, or War Of The Worlds, or Alien Abduction Syndrome.

Terrestrial toe-walkers, and particularly the carnivores, stored their own perspectives on reality in what we call Greek mythology. A feature common to these records is the story of the dapper hero who descended alive into the Underworld, and faced the traces of fleeting dead and clouds of expired dust swept about the darkness without will or core and guarded by monstrous serpents and their hellhound spawn. One of these heroes was Orpheus, a most gifted musician who could even silence the Sirens (Isaiah 14:9-11). When his wife Eurydice died from a snake bite, Orpheus descended alive into hell and played his heavenly music to king Hades, to entice him to return Eurydice to him alive. Eurydice's soul was indeed restored and the two journeyed back toward the light. But Orpheus laid eyes on her too soon and she melted back into the darkness and he was forced to live out his life among the living. Upon his death, he returned and reunited with Eurydice. His music clearly never died.

Greek mythology also makes mention of an Underworld creature so unlike any other that audiences shuddered at the hearing of its name: the Gorgon, basically a huge head with living snakes for hair and eyes whose stare could turn an observer to stone. The name Gorgon relates to the relatively rare noun γοργος (gorgos), terrible or vigorous, but where that word comes from isn't clear. Here at Abarim Publications we suspect it's one of a number of Hebrew terms that were imported into Greek along with the alphabet (see our article on the Hebrew roots of Greek), and stems from the root גרר (garar), to drag or drag away (whence the noun גר, ger, alien, we mentioned above; the -on part could be a remnant of the common -ון, -on, suffix that personifies the verb: "dragged off alien one").

Turning into stone is obviously a prospect that our modern sensibilities urge to avoid, but in classical antiquity, stones were what the civilized world was built of and turning into one was not so much about becoming a lifeless lump but rather a precisely honed cog that fits into a larger machine — hence "You, too, are like living stones, being built up into a spiritual temple" (1 Peter 2:5), and "out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham" (Matthew 3:9). The Hebrew word for son, namely בן (ben) closely associates with the noun אבן ('eben), meaning stone and the verb בנה (bana), meaning to build. From our noun בן (ben), son, augmented with the feminine suffix -ית (-at), comes the word for daughter, namely בת (bat), which is obviously similar to the noun בית (bayit), house.

The Gorgon's striking mythological form was obviously based on the biological octopus (one octopus, two octopodes; it's a common Greek plural), which is a mollusk, a cousin of snails and clams and such, an invertebrate closer related to worms and spiders than to mammals, whose ancestor split from ours long before ours were fish. Octopodes have three hearts, gills (and no lungs) and a skin that breathes and changes color according to the octopus' mood or intent. Its proper eyes are colorblind; the skin functions as a huge third eye that can read the surrounding light and mimic it (Ezekiel 10:12, Revelation 4:8). Octopodes have enormous brains relative to their body mass, greater than most vertebrates, and the majority of their neurons reside in their eight arms, which operate semi-autonomously, like the federated states of a loosely centralized empire. They use their eyes like satraps to see what their arms are up to.

Octopodes live a few years at best. Yet they are shockingly intelligent, inquisitive and playful. Octopodes experience REM sleep, and thus, probably, dreams. In their wake state, they plan strategies and use tools to achieve camouflage, which demonstrates concern for someone else's perceptions, and thus a dazzling level of mental sophistication and even (dare we say it?) the rudiments of Theory of Mind. All this very strongly suggests that octopodes can imagine, which is a mystic quality. The octopus somehow understands what the world looks like through the eyes of the other guy, which requires a very serious level of consciousness. Moreover, octopodes take split seconds to change their appearance, which implies that their strength comes from an instinct to adapt and blend in that is highly similar to the mechanism that gave rise to language in humans. Octopodes excel in the art of blending in, and thus being One — and since God is One, this art is a divine quality.

Researchers wonder where the octopus' amazing intelligence comes from, since it originated very far away from any other intelligent organism, in the dark and inhospitable isolation of the deep sea, and can't have arisen from competition (just like the fastest land animal is not a hundred times faster than the second fastest). Moreover, octopus babies never meet their parents (males die soon after mating and females right before the eggs hatch) and can therefore not learn anything from previous generations. The octopus evolved much earlier than mammals, and the chances are pretty solid that they were the first intelligent creatures on planet earth. If consciousness is indeed permanent and a continuous field rather than a string of unrelated islands (Isaiah 49:1), then perhaps the octopus relates to human rationality the way our biodomes relate to our moods. Perhaps the Gorgon to the Greeks is in Hebrew the cherub that guards the way to paradise.

Many spiritual traditions maintain the notion of a kind of judgement or assessment that befalls humans right after their death. The theology that tries to describe the details of such judgement is usually apologetically complex and perhaps not rarely contaminated with demagogic or economic agendas, but the common bottom line is that individuals are tested for their virtue or divinity or lack thereof. Since God is One, virtue and divinity correspond to the degree with which a person has learned to be one with the rest of creation (the whole of it, which is why religions that preach "us good guys" versus "them bad guys" are decisively ungodly), which is a skill: eleutheria, freedom-by-law.

A newborn baby has little skill and few convictions and only eagerness to live and to learn. But an old person has had their entire life to pursue oneness and avoid isolation, hardness of heart, fear of real or imagined dangers, intolerance, xenophobia, ignorance, hate, or any other manifestation of darkness (which is the absence and not the opposite of enlightenment). Traditions that hold to the permanence of consciousness (in that consciousness, like energy, cannot disappear but only change form), may further assume that our physical universe is a mere layer of dust sprinkled upon a bed rock of consciousness, so that all observable phenomena exist by merit of a core of consciousness (like a pea twenty matrasses down). That in turn means that a consciousness that took a human lifetime to crystalize and structurize into shape, may sweep through the underworld like a bowling ball, to re-emerge in the land of the living and to form around itself a body that corresponds to the nature of its consciousness: perhaps that of a lion, a single snail, an entire school of fish or a colony of bacteria (which is, of course, in turn doomed to dissipate so as to wholly erase the identity of the one so doomed).

But an unborn human baby has no concept of autonomy or language or life outside the womb and has had no opportunity to choose the direction of its own mental evolution. Its tiny body has barely any mass, and its mind consists of pure and unconditioned love. Such an innocent creature desires only to live and reach out and bond with others, no matter who or what, so as to be One with everything and ultimately attain the divinity and the personal company of the Creator Husband (Matthew 18:3-5).

If consciousness is indeed like an arrow point, with its heavenly tip in mankind's technological wisdom and its hellish base at the Heat Death of utter antisocialness (i.e. utter ignorance of someone else's existence, let alone their perspectives on reality), and if indeed the heavenly tip of the biosphere is the sun and its hellish base is the darkest bottom of the ocean, and if spiritual entities may waft in and out of organic bodies (like the demons of Legion, who zipped into the herd of pigs; or the evil spirit that entered king Saul, 1 Samuel 16:14, or the Holy Spirit who enters the templar body of man, 1 Corinthians 6:19, or even Jesus, who was truly dead and thus truly returned to his body that had somehow healed), and if the minds of dead grownups can fall apart and roll down the evolutionary tree to somehow occupy lesser lifeforms (i.e. living things that are less capable of grand unification) — then, perhaps, the unformed consciousness of very young children who have died may congregate into vast but contracting clouds of primordial mind, and end up collectively providing substance to the intelligent consciousness of the creatures of the deep.

Allowing for some more bearish speculations: what if the octopus has managed to tap into some kind of collective consciousness, so that individual octopodes are like the short-living cells of a complex organism, whose single soul is really the sum of the souls of all its individual cells that sing united like a choir and teach each other their communal song? The largest organism known to exist is a 5.5 kilometer wide web of fungus that exists mostly underground, save for its merrily protruding mushrooms. Individual octopodes have different genetic identities, but so do we humans, and our language is a single super-social entity that exists in all our heads at once and defines and unifies us. What if octopodes are, likewise, the mere visible expressions of a kind of spiritual mycelium that is as different from human language as an octopus body is from a mammalian body? What if we could learn its language? What might their records tell? That the Logos is earth's Gandalf, the living are Strider and the cephalopods our world's collective Frodo? What ring might they carry, and what fire might they head to?

Sperm whales eat cephalopods (octopus, squid, cuttlefish, nautilus; about 800 species), and since humans have hunted sperm whales nearly to extinction, cephalopod populations have been on a steady rise for many decades now. Whether the deplorable behavior of humans has unsettled the balance of life beyond repair the next few decades will show, but certain is that something major is on the rise from the deepest parts of the sea (Revelation 20:13).

When we look into the vast realm of our own consciousness, then the sun overhead corresponds to our own ratio, and only when we look past our sun we see the stars of other humans. When we look beyond even those, we see as many other galaxies as there are stars in ours: the integrated networks of other intelligences; those of elephants, wolves, dolphins and a great many more. And all the way at the edge of the visible universe, there beckon the cephalopods, bubbling up from the world's collective subconscious, as living sentiments, desirous to be accepted by earth's global mind. What a dazzling, amazing and wonderful world, inside and out, above and below.

"Be strong and courageous, for you shall give these people the inheritance of the land that I swore to their fathers I would give them. Above all, be strong and very courageous. Be careful to observe all the law that My servant Moses commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right or to the left, so that you may prosper wherever you go. This Book of the Law must not depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. For then you will prosper and succeed in all you do. Have I not commanded you to be strong and courageous? Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go" (Joshua 1:6-9).

"Whoever among you belongs to his people, may YHWH his God be with him, and may he go up" (2 Chronicles 36:23).