Monday, June 05, 2006
REVELATIONS
Alright, so it's almost 2006-06-06, which some people say is the mark of the beast, and some people say is going to be the end of the world, and other people say it is a good occasion play pranks and party.
Why?
Because no one knows exactly what the mind of the writer of an apocalyptic two millennia old Christian vision meant by calling 666 the number of the beast. I can certainly spy the marketing of synchronicities today however.
Is it possible that all synchronicities are deliberately and/or single-handedly (note the two can be divergent adverbs) arranged by some intelligence? Would that make it any less of a synchronicity?
Anyway, Hollywood is releasing a remake of "The Omen" on 6-6-6. First showing at 7:06am? That would be 6 hours 66 minutes, after all. Or maybe 11:06pm, 666 minutes. Too bad there are different ways to count things. Not good for the determinist literalists.
But even before The Omen remake I'd already heard that a movie called "The Beast" is coming out from indie director genius/jerk Brian Flemming. You know, he's that guy who is lining up serious historical/academic arguments for the non-existence of Jesus. You didn't know? This is like the real Da Vinci Code, stuff that could really undermine the church. Never mind the touchy-feely Goddess theories that Dan Brown ripped off, that territory is romantically explosive but nothing new, and the religious and the atheists both discourage the New Age.
Unfortunately, most people are too stupefied (notice I didn't say stupid) by simple and familiar narrative devices to think that Da Vinci Code isn't the ultimate in theological conspiracy thinking.
Come on people, Da Vinci Code is just one extreme, there are others to choose from. And as long as everyone is so literal and extremist, no one is going to really understand what a number like 666 means. Those who genuinely interpret symbols and dreams will remain on the New Age fringes.
Forget this fabricated Da Vinci Code fiction. People should be pissed when they find out what stupid illogical fantasies are Dan Brown's thrilling alternate art history interpretations. Da Vinci's own notes contradict Dan Brown, and the figure in the Last Supper is John, not Mary Magdalene. Oh, but I guess Dan Brown and his 76 million dollars in 2005 know better than to research and teach real art history. Punk.
Right, where was I.
Ok, I was ranting from the basis of recommending an atheist fantasy over an action fantasy. See "The Beast" on 6-6-6, don't see the topically related "Da Vinci Code" (but you should) and don't see "The Omen" (because the original and the spin offs should be enough. Enough already, stop eating the crap.) Why prefer a movie called The Beast? Because "The Beast" is from people who do real research and make real arguments.
I've been researching early Christianity myself lately for some theological sci-fi I'm writing, and I have to admit that it can look like this Jesus is a Frankenstein patchwork of inspirational writings from rival sects. Jesus fulfills Jewish traditions, Jesus comes to do new things. Jesus tells stories which don't always fit together. Jesus is pacifist, Jesus is activist. Jesus says stuff that people who say should be on medication for.
I admire the spirit behind these writings. But that spirit doesn't always (ever?) come through untainted by agendas. Mediums need to take responsibility for their medium colored glasses, mind lenses.
And when this Christian movement got big enough, then the rich and the powerful and the inspired, together they all debated and fought and cherry picked, until out of a pile of wacked out writings (some truly excellent) they printed (well, at first they only had xerox, we know from the early xerox commercials with the monks) the Bible! Never mind subsequent translations and spins, they were all guided by God. We're not talking just some little pop bestseller here. We're talking about the greatest all-time pop bestseller from God Itself! There, that Bible you are holding in your hands even now.
What, you're not holding your Bible? Ho ho, just kidding. Of course you've got your Bible set down by your side as you read this page. We understand, you don't have to be perfect.
Consider this, before I change topics. (And I will change topics, because I've been encouraged by a time-travelling shaman who told me in a dream that he liked the variety of ideas I have). Lazaris - not Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected to see what it would look like to be resurrected, if the technology was ready to do him next, no, I mean Lazaris the channeled post-Seth entity who has an impressive worldview - Lazaris says you need three things to conquer people. Make them feel guilty, control their sexuality, and get them to not trust themselves. Which is why you should see a therapist, hell we all should (though I am done with mine - contrary to what some would like you to think, therapy is not meant to be eternal).
No, just kidding, you're fine. No you're not. You're somewhere in between fine and not fine. That's fine, welcome to the club.
So back to the point, about symbolism. The thing is, we've got to make a mass appeal for easier symbolic communications from God. Note that I write this in Massachusetts, to the masses, in lieu of going to mass. 666 should mark the end of a dangerous unclarity, don't you think?
And this apocalyptic death of unclarity should be 24-7. That's right, all the time. I'm talking waking visions, nightly dreams, nightmares, daydreams, synchronicities, and impulse fantasies. These should all be very clear to people in what they mean. So bad movies and bad movements don't get undeserved followers, you know what I mean?
Jus this morning I had a dream that might have been about the last of days. I don't know, I'll just relate the tale. You decide for you. (I'll decide for me)
I dreamt that this cop on a motorcycle came in the middle of the night to look into my car, which I had parked in front of my deceased parents' house (which we're trying to sell but everyone knows the market is slowing down). I had made a Halloween display in the Jetta, and this motorcycle cop had come to look at it. In the middle of the night.
I wasn't scared, I went to talk to the cop. He's excited to tell me that he was drawn to see my car by a dream that he had had, and by synchronicities.
I said great, I didn't know that my intuitive ritualistic display would bring someone, let's talk about dreams. The cop says he comes from Washington state. How did you get all the way here to New York State, I said. Oh don't you know, the cop says, I'm a spirit, and he glows and slowly vanishes.
Wow, I'm so excited, I'm seeing spirits! I look to the backyard where I grew up, and I see a bunch of spirits walking toward me. I say to myself what the mystic scientist Emanual Swedenborg said happened to him, "my eyes were opened to the spiritual world". Now I know how he felt, I thought!
Then I considered: I want to meet nice spirits, wise friendly grandparent type spirits. And that's how they start out. But then I see this teenager with a black heavy metal concert t-shirt approaching (yeah, like I was). I start feeling that these spirits are obsessed with death and pain. I declare loudly with force, "There will be no speaking of killing! All of you who would speak of killing, get out now!" And I got so emotional and angry that I wake up!
So there, that is the Revelation of Carl of New York. Carl now residing near Salem, witch town USA. Where, by the way, they are *not* planning much for 666 events. Either it's a missed or avoided opportunity. But remember Salem, because it comes up again soon in the story of what this all does or doesn't mean.
So, is my dream literal, was I visited by spirits?
Or was it symbolic, were the spirits all sides of me?
Does it help to know that there is a personal precognitive aspect of the dream? That is to say, it helped to prepare me for my day. Basically, the friendly cop had me looking for limitations or authorities that some might find scary but I could work with. Maybe I had even called to me. Today I discovered I had some tricky paperwork to do, so I kept my cool (no going ballistic and wanting to kill someone) and worked it out.
Maybe the storyteller in me is working overtime and feeling haunted. Certainly I'm staying up late writing this book of life report. Check out the symbolism of the next true events that morning:
The electrician hit a water pipe while adding a vent to a downstairs bathroom. Water started spraying onto my boxes of rocks I'd collected and started reviewing recently. I was the president of a mineral club that met at Harvard for a couple years, and I have the garage to prove it. The electrician finds the water shutoff and complains that this ruins his day.
The electrician says the last time he had this happen was in the house of seven gables. You know, the place where American spooky writer Nathaniel Hawthorne spent time growing up, and set the complex tale of an ambiguously haunted New England family. My electrician was there screwing some boards into place when the final screw nicked a water pipe. He held it like a spritzing artery and cried for help! Help! But no one came to help. So he managed to catch the water with plastic bags and find the shut off before valuable antiques became endangered.
I live a few miles from the House of Seven Gables, when the Revelation of Carl comes to me. As I write, the black cat we adopted from the Salem animal shelter purrs in my lap. Right, so do these symbols help to pin down the meaning of my dream? Of course not, they only add more layers.
Ah but my friend Kurt interprets his dreams with little difficulty. They come clearly enough, and he gets to just talk to the spirits and ask them what things mean. Well, I try! I just get so excited, and maybe we talk a little but I don't remember too much, and then I wake up. I try to hold onto words and phrases and names, and Kurt says that's part of my problem. You gotta understand symbols. Puns and personal associations, mostly.
Most of my dreams I interpret by connecting the feeling of the mundanely mythic situations with the things that are going on in my physical life. And sometimes I get so excited I just point blank ask the spirit a name or address. I'll tell them my website in case they have a body somewhere and can search the web. I'm Carl, google me.
Actually, I have been more able recently to meet people this way. One director sent me his movie to watch about lucid dreaming called "The Door", and I had a fine time reviewing it on my site. I talked to a guy in a dream that I thought might be him, and several facts coincided, and we decided that although he didn't recall that night, he probably was the dream person I met. He's met others in dreams and had conversations, exchanged information, proved telepathy, that sort of thing.
So here's another possibility - we're all in this big energy web ocean mish-mash bucket, and we telepathically connect and meet each other in very confused states with various ensconcing thought manifestations swirling all around. Our brains pick out and remember just some of the more memorable stuff, like the shape of some rocks in the surf.
Give me anything but this devil 666 stuff. At least for the next 36 hours, ok? Then I'll be in the clear of a foreboding date.
That is, assuming that you use the Gregorian calendar like me, which John of Revelations probably didn't, so June 6 2006 is probably not what he could have meant or considered. But devil be damned, marketing full speed ahead, we've got pop culture to sell and Dan Brown rivals to make rich.
So happy whatever day this is! Certainly, it's not the day that I figure everything out. But someone somewhere has, I hope. I'm still at the stage of somewhat amusingly, somewhat obnoxiously, piling up the implications and titillations in my overloaded brain. Methinks I need to grow some more consciousness, enough to get me past this 06-06-06 stuff.
The fear of the number 666 is called "Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia".
In the Bible verse, 666 is the number of a second beast who comes to end the world, a beast who is more sophisticated than the first and who confuses people between good and evil. That would fit well with the idea that 666 is 2/3 of the way to 1000. Therefore the meaning is to beware of someone who seems almost there but is missing the last of three steps. Jesus is the man of the trinity, so don't be fooled by imitations.
Others say 666 could represent a person who has already come and gone, because John may have been reporting in apocalyptic caricatures - very damning satire - the brutal events of the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans in 72 AD.
And what did Swedenborg, great symbologist that he was, think 666 corresponded to? I'm sure he had a specific opinion, but it's harder to find than I expected. I'll let you know when I find out.
Why?
Because no one knows exactly what the mind of the writer of an apocalyptic two millennia old Christian vision meant by calling 666 the number of the beast. I can certainly spy the marketing of synchronicities today however.
Is it possible that all synchronicities are deliberately and/or single-handedly (note the two can be divergent adverbs) arranged by some intelligence? Would that make it any less of a synchronicity?
Anyway, Hollywood is releasing a remake of "The Omen" on 6-6-6. First showing at 7:06am? That would be 6 hours 66 minutes, after all. Or maybe 11:06pm, 666 minutes. Too bad there are different ways to count things. Not good for the determinist literalists.
But even before The Omen remake I'd already heard that a movie called "The Beast" is coming out from indie director genius/jerk Brian Flemming. You know, he's that guy who is lining up serious historical/academic arguments for the non-existence of Jesus. You didn't know? This is like the real Da Vinci Code, stuff that could really undermine the church. Never mind the touchy-feely Goddess theories that Dan Brown ripped off, that territory is romantically explosive but nothing new, and the religious and the atheists both discourage the New Age.
Unfortunately, most people are too stupefied (notice I didn't say stupid) by simple and familiar narrative devices to think that Da Vinci Code isn't the ultimate in theological conspiracy thinking.
Come on people, Da Vinci Code is just one extreme, there are others to choose from. And as long as everyone is so literal and extremist, no one is going to really understand what a number like 666 means. Those who genuinely interpret symbols and dreams will remain on the New Age fringes.
Forget this fabricated Da Vinci Code fiction. People should be pissed when they find out what stupid illogical fantasies are Dan Brown's thrilling alternate art history interpretations. Da Vinci's own notes contradict Dan Brown, and the figure in the Last Supper is John, not Mary Magdalene. Oh, but I guess Dan Brown and his 76 million dollars in 2005 know better than to research and teach real art history. Punk.
Right, where was I.
Ok, I was ranting from the basis of recommending an atheist fantasy over an action fantasy. See "The Beast" on 6-6-6, don't see the topically related "Da Vinci Code" (but you should) and don't see "The Omen" (because the original and the spin offs should be enough. Enough already, stop eating the crap.) Why prefer a movie called The Beast? Because "The Beast" is from people who do real research and make real arguments.
I've been researching early Christianity myself lately for some theological sci-fi I'm writing, and I have to admit that it can look like this Jesus is a Frankenstein patchwork of inspirational writings from rival sects. Jesus fulfills Jewish traditions, Jesus comes to do new things. Jesus tells stories which don't always fit together. Jesus is pacifist, Jesus is activist. Jesus says stuff that people who say should be on medication for.
I admire the spirit behind these writings. But that spirit doesn't always (ever?) come through untainted by agendas. Mediums need to take responsibility for their medium colored glasses, mind lenses.
And when this Christian movement got big enough, then the rich and the powerful and the inspired, together they all debated and fought and cherry picked, until out of a pile of wacked out writings (some truly excellent) they printed (well, at first they only had xerox, we know from the early xerox commercials with the monks) the Bible! Never mind subsequent translations and spins, they were all guided by God. We're not talking just some little pop bestseller here. We're talking about the greatest all-time pop bestseller from God Itself! There, that Bible you are holding in your hands even now.
What, you're not holding your Bible? Ho ho, just kidding. Of course you've got your Bible set down by your side as you read this page. We understand, you don't have to be perfect.
Consider this, before I change topics. (And I will change topics, because I've been encouraged by a time-travelling shaman who told me in a dream that he liked the variety of ideas I have). Lazaris - not Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected to see what it would look like to be resurrected, if the technology was ready to do him next, no, I mean Lazaris the channeled post-Seth entity who has an impressive worldview - Lazaris says you need three things to conquer people. Make them feel guilty, control their sexuality, and get them to not trust themselves. Which is why you should see a therapist, hell we all should (though I am done with mine - contrary to what some would like you to think, therapy is not meant to be eternal).
No, just kidding, you're fine. No you're not. You're somewhere in between fine and not fine. That's fine, welcome to the club.
So back to the point, about symbolism. The thing is, we've got to make a mass appeal for easier symbolic communications from God. Note that I write this in Massachusetts, to the masses, in lieu of going to mass. 666 should mark the end of a dangerous unclarity, don't you think?
And this apocalyptic death of unclarity should be 24-7. That's right, all the time. I'm talking waking visions, nightly dreams, nightmares, daydreams, synchronicities, and impulse fantasies. These should all be very clear to people in what they mean. So bad movies and bad movements don't get undeserved followers, you know what I mean?
Jus this morning I had a dream that might have been about the last of days. I don't know, I'll just relate the tale. You decide for you. (I'll decide for me)
I dreamt that this cop on a motorcycle came in the middle of the night to look into my car, which I had parked in front of my deceased parents' house (which we're trying to sell but everyone knows the market is slowing down). I had made a Halloween display in the Jetta, and this motorcycle cop had come to look at it. In the middle of the night.
I wasn't scared, I went to talk to the cop. He's excited to tell me that he was drawn to see my car by a dream that he had had, and by synchronicities.
I said great, I didn't know that my intuitive ritualistic display would bring someone, let's talk about dreams. The cop says he comes from Washington state. How did you get all the way here to New York State, I said. Oh don't you know, the cop says, I'm a spirit, and he glows and slowly vanishes.
Wow, I'm so excited, I'm seeing spirits! I look to the backyard where I grew up, and I see a bunch of spirits walking toward me. I say to myself what the mystic scientist Emanual Swedenborg said happened to him, "my eyes were opened to the spiritual world". Now I know how he felt, I thought!
Then I considered: I want to meet nice spirits, wise friendly grandparent type spirits. And that's how they start out. But then I see this teenager with a black heavy metal concert t-shirt approaching (yeah, like I was). I start feeling that these spirits are obsessed with death and pain. I declare loudly with force, "There will be no speaking of killing! All of you who would speak of killing, get out now!" And I got so emotional and angry that I wake up!
So there, that is the Revelation of Carl of New York. Carl now residing near Salem, witch town USA. Where, by the way, they are *not* planning much for 666 events. Either it's a missed or avoided opportunity. But remember Salem, because it comes up again soon in the story of what this all does or doesn't mean.
So, is my dream literal, was I visited by spirits?
Or was it symbolic, were the spirits all sides of me?
Does it help to know that there is a personal precognitive aspect of the dream? That is to say, it helped to prepare me for my day. Basically, the friendly cop had me looking for limitations or authorities that some might find scary but I could work with. Maybe I had even called to me. Today I discovered I had some tricky paperwork to do, so I kept my cool (no going ballistic and wanting to kill someone) and worked it out.
Maybe the storyteller in me is working overtime and feeling haunted. Certainly I'm staying up late writing this book of life report. Check out the symbolism of the next true events that morning:
The electrician hit a water pipe while adding a vent to a downstairs bathroom. Water started spraying onto my boxes of rocks I'd collected and started reviewing recently. I was the president of a mineral club that met at Harvard for a couple years, and I have the garage to prove it. The electrician finds the water shutoff and complains that this ruins his day.
The electrician says the last time he had this happen was in the house of seven gables. You know, the place where American spooky writer Nathaniel Hawthorne spent time growing up, and set the complex tale of an ambiguously haunted New England family. My electrician was there screwing some boards into place when the final screw nicked a water pipe. He held it like a spritzing artery and cried for help! Help! But no one came to help. So he managed to catch the water with plastic bags and find the shut off before valuable antiques became endangered.
I live a few miles from the House of Seven Gables, when the Revelation of Carl comes to me. As I write, the black cat we adopted from the Salem animal shelter purrs in my lap. Right, so do these symbols help to pin down the meaning of my dream? Of course not, they only add more layers.
Ah but my friend Kurt interprets his dreams with little difficulty. They come clearly enough, and he gets to just talk to the spirits and ask them what things mean. Well, I try! I just get so excited, and maybe we talk a little but I don't remember too much, and then I wake up. I try to hold onto words and phrases and names, and Kurt says that's part of my problem. You gotta understand symbols. Puns and personal associations, mostly.
Most of my dreams I interpret by connecting the feeling of the mundanely mythic situations with the things that are going on in my physical life. And sometimes I get so excited I just point blank ask the spirit a name or address. I'll tell them my website in case they have a body somewhere and can search the web. I'm Carl, google me.
Actually, I have been more able recently to meet people this way. One director sent me his movie to watch about lucid dreaming called "The Door", and I had a fine time reviewing it on my site. I talked to a guy in a dream that I thought might be him, and several facts coincided, and we decided that although he didn't recall that night, he probably was the dream person I met. He's met others in dreams and had conversations, exchanged information, proved telepathy, that sort of thing.
So here's another possibility - we're all in this big energy web ocean mish-mash bucket, and we telepathically connect and meet each other in very confused states with various ensconcing thought manifestations swirling all around. Our brains pick out and remember just some of the more memorable stuff, like the shape of some rocks in the surf.
Give me anything but this devil 666 stuff. At least for the next 36 hours, ok? Then I'll be in the clear of a foreboding date.
That is, assuming that you use the Gregorian calendar like me, which John of Revelations probably didn't, so June 6 2006 is probably not what he could have meant or considered. But devil be damned, marketing full speed ahead, we've got pop culture to sell and Dan Brown rivals to make rich.
So happy whatever day this is! Certainly, it's not the day that I figure everything out. But someone somewhere has, I hope. I'm still at the stage of somewhat amusingly, somewhat obnoxiously, piling up the implications and titillations in my overloaded brain. Methinks I need to grow some more consciousness, enough to get me past this 06-06-06 stuff.
The fear of the number 666 is called "Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia".
In the Bible verse, 666 is the number of a second beast who comes to end the world, a beast who is more sophisticated than the first and who confuses people between good and evil. That would fit well with the idea that 666 is 2/3 of the way to 1000. Therefore the meaning is to beware of someone who seems almost there but is missing the last of three steps. Jesus is the man of the trinity, so don't be fooled by imitations.
Others say 666 could represent a person who has already come and gone, because John may have been reporting in apocalyptic caricatures - very damning satire - the brutal events of the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans in 72 AD.
And what did Swedenborg, great symbologist that he was, think 666 corresponded to? I'm sure he had a specific opinion, but it's harder to find than I expected. I'll let you know when I find out.
