The infinite Universe.
Have we, or have we not, an analogical right to the inference that this perceptible Universe – that this cluster of clusters – is but one of a series of clusters of clusters, the rest of which are invisible through distance – through the diffusion of their light being so excessive, ere it reaches us, as not to produce upon our retinas a light-impression – or from there being no such emanation as light at all, in these unspeakably distant worlds – or, lastly, from the mere interval being so vast, that the electric tidings of their presence in Space, have not yet – through the lapsing myriads of years – been enabled to traverse that interval?
Have we any right to inferences – have we any ground whatever for visions such as these? If we have a right to them in any degree, we have a right to their infinite extension.
The human brain has obviously a leaning to the “Infinite,” and fondles the phantom of the idea. It seems to long with a passionate fervor for this impossible conception, with the hope of intellectually believing it when conceived. What is general among the whole race of Man, of course no individual of that race can be warranted in considering abnormal; nevertheless, there may be a class of superior intelligences, to whom the human bias alluded to may wear all the character of monomania.
The sequel.
In speaking of what is ordinarily implied by the expression, "Universe," I shall take a phrase of limitation – "the Universe of stars." Why this distinction is considered necessary, will be seen in the sequel.
After reading the above about “the sequel,” I didn’t believe that Poe himself ever intended to write the sequel himself. I believed (and still do) that Poe knew the significance of his theory, and he knew that one day someone else would write the sequel. I decided that I had written his sequel, I had written the sequel to ‘Eureka,’ and as such I used his introduction as my own. Poe and myself, we are kindred spirits, we share the same beliefs about science and philosophy, and I am proud to have written his sequel. Incidentally, this is one of the last things he wrote, and the last time he was seen alive was a year later, he was found delirious in the streets. He mentions the effects of trying to comprehend the infinite above, I think it may have driven him mad, like it did myself. You think it’s so easy to keep your senses? There is literally no bigger discovery that any man could make than the infinite Universe. It's almost as if he was warning himself not to think about it, as if he knew what would happen if he tried. Maybe he just couldn’t help but try to comprehend the infinite, maybe that was what finally brought him unstuck, maybe the infinite Universe blew his mind.
Anyway, when I was really starting to make some serious progress with my theories, I became curious about the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls.’ I had heard something about them, but I didn’t really know what they were except that they were very old Bible passages found preserved around the Dead Sea. So I borrowed a book from the library, it was by Michael Wise and Robert Eisenmann, which I took as something of a small sign. (Note: Later I bought a book of Dead Sea Scrolls translations by Geza Vermes, the quotes I use are more likely from the Geza Vermes version.)
I was sitting on the train reading the book, when I came across the following passage...
The Birth of Noah
…When he is born, they shall all be darkened together…he is born in the night and he comes out Perfect…with a weight of three hundred and fifty shekels…he slept until the division of the days…in the daytime until the completion of years…a share is set aside for him…
…Holy Ones will remember…lights will be revealed to him…they will teach him everything that…human Wisdom, and every wise man…in the lands, and he shall be great…mankind will be shaken, and until…he will reveal Mysteries like the Highest Angels…and with the Understanding of the Mysteries of Existence…I will strengthen his Goodness…and he will not die in the days of Wickedness, and the Wisdom of Your mouth will go forth. He who opposes You will deserve death. One will write the words of God in a book that does not wear out, but my words you will adorn. At the time of the Wicked, he will know you forever, a man of your servants…of the hand, two…a birthmark. And there will be lentils on…and small birthmarks on his thigh. And after two years he will be able to distinguish one thing from another. In his youth, he will be like…like a man who knows nothing until the time when he knows the three Books. And then he will acquire wisdom and learn understanding…a vision will come to him on his knees. And with his father and his ancestors…life and old age. Counsel and prudence will be with him, and he will know the Secrets of mankind. His Wisdom and Understanding will spread to all peoples, and he will know the Secrets of the living. And all their designs against him will come to nothing, and the spiritual legacy for all the living will be enriched, and his rule over all the living will be great. His designs will succeed, for he is the Elect of God. His birth and the breath of his Spirit…and his designs will endure forever…
…Blessed be he!…and he will not die in the days of Wickedness. Woe to you, O fool, for your mouth will deceive you by…incurring the death penalty. Who will write these words of mine in a book that will not decay, and keep this word of mine in a scroll, which will not fade away? Behold…and the pleasure of the Wicked will cease forever…
[4Q534-536]
I couldn’t believe what I was reading, “he slept until the division of the days… in the daytime until the completion of years,” I worked nightshift, “he will reveal Mysteries like the Highest of Angels,” “the Mysteries of Existence,” “birthmarks on his thigh.” I started breathing quickly, trying to come to terms with what I was seeing on the page. I overheard people in a seat near me talking about something out the window, I looked out of the train to see a huge rainbow right across the sky! I put my head in my hands, “oh no!” I thought, “it really is true!” Suddenly I was sucked right back in, and everything I’d been trying to ignore came flooding back. Here I was trying to get on with my life and make something of myself, and God had called me back. That was on the 5th or 6th of November 2003, about 4:15pm on a train going up the Blue Mountains.
In the story of Noah, the rainbow in the sky is a reminder of God’s promise that never again will He destroy every living thing as He had done. The rainbow I saw told me that God has promised not to destroy the world, that it is my mission to save it, and that I cannot possibly fail. I will always remember that rainbow, it is the sign of God’s covenant of peace with the earth, and of God’s promise to myself. The world, and the human race, shall endure forever.
A lot of Christians who believe in the end of the world nonsense, they will try to tell you that the rainbow is a sign that never again will God destroy the world by a flood, this is just plain wrong. The Bible clearly says “never again will I destroy every living thing as I have done.” In short, Christian theology about Judgement Day and the rapture and all that shit just doesn’t match with the lessons of Genesis.
I began to think about Jesus a lot, “if I’m the Messiah, who’s Jesus?” Work on my theories of space had slowed a lot, I wasn’t having so many ideas any more. My theories were nearing completion, so I began to study the Bible a lot more intensely.
I realised that if I’m the Messiah, I needed to be able to tell people what to believe, I needed to somehow “judge the world.” I believed in Jesus, but I didn’t know that Jesus was for real. The other thing was that I tried to follow the rules of Christianity, but I wasn’t very good at it. I just didn’t see why I could and could not do certain things which to my mind didn’t harm anyone but possibly myself. “Why would God choose me?” I asked myself. “Why would God choose a Messiah that couldn’t even be a ‘good Christian’?” I didn’t really understand it, but by this time I knew that I must be a pretty smart cookie, so if anyone could figure out who Jesus was, and what religion or rules to follow, I could.
I knew that there were prophecies about me, so naturally I thought that the best place to find out the truth about Jesus would be the prophetic books, by reading
the prophecies about Jesus, so that was where I started. What I found really amazed me, I read the prophetic books a lot, but I had never read them with the intention of finding out who Jesus was, only to get advice or to find out who I was. There is a very famous passage which all the Christians point to as being about Jesus, Isaiah 53, ‘The Suffering Servant.’ I noticed something in that passage which seems to have been overlooked for the last two thousand years!
Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand. After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
[Isaiah 53]
This passage talks about a man being taken away by oppression and judgement, but then it clearly says “he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.” Somehow I didn’t think that being childless and dying at the age of 32 constitutes seeing your offspring and prolonging your days, the man in this passage is condemned by many, but he does not die by execution. “By his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,” it was by my knowledge that I could save the human race. What about the line “he had no beauty or majesty about him”? From what I’ve always understood about Jesus, he was the most beautiful man who ever lived, he was the embodiment of God, who they tell us “is love.”
My next move was to study the Gospels, I did this by putting all four Gospels up against each other in columns and then moving each of the stories from Jesus’ life that are the same events next to each other, so I could compare the different versions of all the stories properly. There were a lot of inconsistencies. The birth of Jesus is a great example. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem for the census and stayed in a stable because there was no room at the inn, then returned to Nazareth via Jerusalem. According to Matthew, Joseph and Mary lived in a house in Bethlehem, fled to Egypt to escape King Herod, then returned to Israel and settled in Nazareth. The other thing I noticed was that in the book of John there were no stories about the casting out of demons. This I took to be a sign that the Gospel of John was the most reliable, since everyone knows that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, not by “demons.” So I studied the book of John next.
The book of John is interesting because a large number of miracles are unwitnessed, like the fig tree withering overnight, or when Jesus puts mud in a blind man’s eyes and tells him to wash in a pool some distance away, or when the man comes to him who has a sick child at home and Jesus tells him “go, your child will be healed.” Other miracles can be easily explained away by a sceptical mind, for example, the witness to the resurrection in John is Mary Magdalene, a prostitute and the rumoured girlfriend of Jesus, or the resurrection of Lazarus, a personal friend of Jesus who could quite easily have just been hiding in a tomb waiting for Jesus to pretend to resurrect him, or walking on water under the cover of darkness. It was two thousand years ago, David Copperfield once made the Statue of Liberty disappear, surely someone as smart as Jesus could fool a few ancient peasants.
While studying the Gospels, I also noticed that all of the prophecies quoted in the Gospels aren’t actual prophecies about Jesus. There are cases of history being written to fulfil prophecy, like being born in Bethlehem, and even history being written to fulfil a mistranslated prophecy, the virgin birth was based on a mistranslated prophecy at the time which actually read “the young woman will conceive a child,” rather than “the virgin will conceive a child.” There are many cases of single lines being taken totally out of context, like “not one of his bones will be broken,” quoted when Jesus’ legs aren’t broken after being crucified, this passage actually comes from a psalm about having divine protection, Jesus may not have had any broken bones but he did get crucified. Just for the record, I’ve never broken any bones. There are also cases of self-fulfilling prophecies, like when Jesus tells his disciples to fetch him a donkey because there’s a prophecy about it. I learned that there are actually zero prophecies about Jesus in the Old Testament, with the possible exception of a few prophecies portraying Jesus as an antichrist, or a false god.
I learned that Jesus was not the Messiah, Jesus was not the One, but then I became confused. “If Jesus isn’t the Messiah, what am I supposed to do?” I thought perhaps I would have to convert to Judaism, but I looked at all of the rules and the laws and I thought, “there is no way I can do all of this stuff, and there is no way I can get the whole world to do all of this stuff.” I didn’t know what to do, what to think, who God was, what laws I should follow, how to judge the world. “Why would God choose a Messiah that can’t even keep the law?” I didn’t understand, it didn’t make any sense to me, “why would God choose me?”
Back at the house, Pat had moved out some time ago, he moved in with this hippie chick Skye. I liked Skye, when Pat was at work we used to hang out a bit at the house. After Pat moved out this guy Jason moved in, Jason was one of Tony’s friends, he was alright but he liked to throw his weight around a bit, he was kind of like an adult bully. Tim or Davo would come around occasionally, but with the exception of church, I didn’t have much of a social life in those days. All of my time was occupied with work, sleep, or my theories. That was the way I liked it, I really felt like I was accomplishing something. I read about Isaac Newton, and how he said that women just get in the way of work. I wasn’t sure if it was true at this stage, the Messiah thing I mean, but Britney Spears was my main source of motivation. She was the only woman for me, and once I finished my theories, she would be mine, or so I hoped. I could wait for love in heaven. I did everything, all of my theories, trying to save the world, I mean I did it because I was told to, but I did it for Britney Spears. I hadn’t had a girlfriend for a long time, and I’d never been in love before, I used to dream of perfect love with Britney Spears, two people created for each other by God.
I did love reading biographies of great scientists. Isaac Newton was my favourite, but I did read a biography of Einstein in the early days of my theories, it was a great book because it talked a lot about how Einstein came up with his ideas, about the thought experiments he used and I used it in addition to ‘A Brief History Of Time’ to teach myself about space. The other guy I felt like I had a connection with was Tesla, I loved the way he was a frustrated genius, brilliant and important, but poor and bitter.
I pretty much just kept to myself most
of the time. I had work to do, I didn’t have time for drinking and partying. When I wasn’t at work, I was at the computer. I used to laugh in those days imagining what a movie about my life would be like, just me smoking cigarettes and thinking about stuff, and then sitting on the computer writing it down. Not the most action packed biopic ever made.
While I was reading all of these prophecies and stuff, I became a little curious about the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and whether there were prophecies about me in there too. So I had a bit of a read. There were indeed prophecies about me, but they were kind of vague, just typical Messiah arrives and puts an end to evil sort of stuff, but there were a couple of interesting things, but it was all pretty general Judgement Day sort of stuff.
There was one passage in the Egyptian Book of the Dead which really caught my eye. Talking about the sun it said “thy light with its manifold colours is incomprehensible.” Remember, I had been reading about Isaac Newton, my idol, and I knew that before Isaac Newton people believed that sunlight was just white. It was Isaac Newton who proved that sunlight is made up of all of the colours of the spectrum. Isaac Newton did this by passing sunlight through one glass triangular prism to scatter it, then passing it through a second glass triangular prism to bring it back to the original white sunlight. I began to wonder if the Ancient Egyptians had performed similar experiments to Isaac Newton? After all, they did worship the sun. Then I realised that the pyramids are basically four sided triangular prisms!
I was very excited about this idea, my brain was ticking over with all sorts of crazy ideas about how the pyramids might work. I spent about three weeks trying all sorts of things to get this pyramid theory to work, and when I finally solved it, it was the greatest feeling! There really is no feeling like discovering something, there is no greater adrenalin rush than a genuine “eureka moment.” I came out of my room all excited, and I turned on the TV to try to relax. A kids drama show was on, and the very first thing I saw was a bad guy, and the very first thing he said was “now I possess the power of the pyramid,” and his hands were over a glowing pyramid. That was all I needed to see and I turned it off. I told Jason what happened when I turned on the TV, he said “pyramid is one of the most common words in the English language,” although he probably didn’t say it as eloquently as that. Yeah, whatever man, I know what happened.
Judgement Day Page 6
