Flaker of Flints

To believe in any conspiracy, whether true or false, is to believe in a system or sector run not by popular consent but by an elite, acting in its own self-interest. Call this elite the Deep State, or the Swamp; call it the Illuminati, or Opus Dei, or the Jews, or merely call it the major banking institutions and the Federal Reserve — the point is, a conspiracy is an inherently anti-democratic force.... Especially pernicious is the way that false conspiracies absolve their followers of engaging with the truth. Citizenship in a conspiracy-society doesn’t require evaluating a statement of proposed fact for its truth-value, and then accepting it or rejecting it accordingly, so much as it requires the complete and total rejection of all truth-value that comes from an enemy source, and the substitution of an alternative plot, narrated from elsewhere.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.... Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed. The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

The world is mysterious and revelation must be transmitted from a supernatural source, through the mediation of angels; there is a hidden world of angels and demons that is directly relevant to human destiny; and this destiny is finally determined by a definitive eschatological judgment.

The end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

Beware of agitators and instigators who use legitimate protests to ignite chaos between protestors and police.

When you look closely at the seams between order and chaos, do you see the same things I see? The strain, the tears, the glimpses of truth hidden underneath. Why do they fight so desperately to mask what they are? Or is it that they become who they are when they put on the mask?

God uses the animals Behemoth and Leviathan to remind us that, like everything that exists, the enormous forces of chaos and disorder are subject to divine power, even if it does not annihilate them. From the opening words the emphasis is on the creatureliness of these mighty beasts: "Look at Behemoth, my creature, just as you are!" (Job 40:15). Job has a trait in common with these animals: all have come from God's hand. They are, as it were, holdovers from the chaos out of which the world, the cosmos, emerged. Because of his undeserved suffering, Job sees existence as a chaos, a continuation of the original disorder. God is trying to show Job that divine power controls these chaotic forces, although at the same time God says that they will not be destroyed. They represent the wicked of whom God has just been speaking (Job 40:11–13); they are forces existing in the world. The Lord does not forthwith put an end to these remnants of the original chaos (into which Job has ...

[The angel answered], "Dream not of their fight as of a duel, nor [physical the] wounds of head or heel: [these do not] join the Son human to Godhead, with more strength to foil your enemy. Nor so is [Satan killed,] whose fall from Heaven, [deadlier a] bruise, disabled not to give you your death's wound, which [Christ], who comes your savior, shall [repair], not by destroying Satan, but, [in you and in your seed, destroying Satan's works.] .... [Triumphing] o'er his foes [will Christ] surprise the Serpent, Prince of Air, and drag in chains through all his realm, and there confounded leave. Then Christ will enter glory, and resume his seat at God's right hand, exalted high above all names in Heaven; then shall come when this world's dissolution shall be ripe.

Interviewer: What do you mean you’ll sometimes extend yourself … work the people up a bit? Morrison: Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That’s all it was: just curiosity. Interviewer: What did you do to test the bounds? Morrison: Just push a situation as far it it’ll go. Interviewer: And yet you don’t feel at any time that things got out of control? Morrison: Never. Interviewer: There is a quote attributed to you. It appears in print a lot. It goes: “I’m interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos…” Morrison: “… especially activity that appears to have no meaning.”

...In my view, these simply aren’t the sort of outcomes that you expect from atoms blindly interacting according to the laws of physics.  These are, instead, the signatures of higher-level causation—and specifically, of a teleological force that operates in our universe to make it distinctively cruel and horrible...

Elisha’s servant got up early and went out. He saw an army with horses and chariots surrounding the city. [The] servant said to Elisha, “Oh, no! Master, what will we do?” “Don’t be afraid,” Elisha said, “because there are more of us than there are of them.” Then Elisha prayed, “Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” Then the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he saw that the mountain was full of horses and fiery chariots surrounding Elisha.

...Jeremiah had seen what there was for all to see if only they would look, but the others refused to look, simply denied, and were unable to see. The royal folk had for so long lived in a protective, fake world that their perceptual field was skewed and with their best looking they could not see what was there to see...

One reason for the interest in phase transitions is scale invariance: the fluctuations that exist near the critical point occur on all possible length and time scales. A second reason for our interest is called universality: the striking similarity in behavior near the critical point among systems that are quite different from each other far from the critical point.... How can correlations actually extend an infinite distance away, without requiring a series of amplification stations all along the way? We can understand such “infinite-range propagation” as arising from the huge multiplicity of interaction paths that connect two atoms in dimensions greater than one. (In one dimension, there is no multiplicity of interaction paths, and atoms become aligned only at absolute zero temperature.)

Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination? And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

Then the man said to me...“I’ve come because of your words! For twenty-one days the [prince] of the Persian kingdom blocked my way. But then Michael, one of the highest [princes], came to help me. I left Michael there with the [prince] of the Persian kingdom. But I’ve come to help you understand what will happen to your people in the future, because there is another vision concerning that time.”

The [Princes]. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special perceptions are being developed. The idea of the “[Princes]” is beginning to form in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The [Princes] have secret entrances, and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a glance. The [Princes] appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent.

...Please remember that the key element to the understanding of these rituals was that what we might participate in here below, the ritual event in the Temple, was not the real thing. The real thing was already lived out in heaven. And visions given to priests and prophets concerned elements of that which was already unspeakably full, outside time, space and narrative possibility in heaven. That fulness had been glimpsed by prophets and priests such as Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel as something that was on its way in, was coming into the world and would eventually arrive as the terrible “day of the Lord” of which Zechariah speaks and which would lead to the end of the Temple. What we have in the book of the Apocalypse is the account of how that fulness, emerging from the Holy Place, interacts with time-structured sequential earthly reality in the form of the coming of Jesus, his teaching, his death and resurrection and the outworking of his prophesies concerning the destruction of the Tem...