Akismet has caught 152,000 spam for you since you installed it.

Doesn’t God save 144,000 at the End of Days or something? I wonder if my spam filter is preventing God from saving the Righteous among us.

I could tell you about the river… or we could just get in.

There is an ancient truth that goes like this: God created Earth and became so enamored of it that he descended into it and then forgot he was God. The part of himself he left behind (because he is incapable of pouring out completely or exhausting his own power) realized what was happening and sent him a counterpart, through which he could reunite the missing pieces of himself and thereby remember he was in fact God. This is the Shekinah Sophia Eve Zoey Maid Marian Magdalene etc etc etc. The Spirit of God’s presence on Earth. Her purpose is to reflect God back on himself and show him the Truth of Who And What He Really Is. He in turn liberates her from the debased prison of gross matter which she willingly entered in order to rescue him. See also Simon Magus and Helena, Don Quixote and Dulcinea, and any one of a million other examples. Philip K. Dick called it anamnesis and outlined it brilliantly in his novel Divine Invasion. It is, as far as I can tell, one of - if not the - esoteric core of all Western religions, if not all religions period. Or rather, it just one way to slice it.

But I think it makes for a pretty fucking good slice, as it forms the basis for devotional paths of love.

Because, you see, it’s not that we are God, but that we can be one with Him.

The night before I left, while the Devil was trying to play yet another hypnotic trick on me, Miriam said to Yeshua: “What is this, the Temptation in the desert scene?” A witchdoctor told me that people with her birthday are so heavily intuitive that they feel like they have no choice in their actions. I liken it in some ways to dreams of being in a driverless car, rolling down a hill. I used to dream that when I was a child. My oldest sister was there too and we were careening down the hill in front of our house in Hudson, Wisconsin. My friend told me about dreams like that he has last night while we were at the Five Point eating mini tacos. They weren’t quite so good as the waitress promised us.

I saw the duct-tape face guy at QFC today. I hate that place. He tried to microwave me. He had a plastic visor over his face, and a lot of the duct tape was removed. I bought a “Vitamin Water” called “Charge” that has a bunch of clever marketing copy about superheroes:

Superheroes aren’t what they used to be. what happened? It’s like saving the world is a huge hassle or something? No one wants to take charge anymore and there’s just lots of finger-pointing and “he said she said”.

I wonder what he is hiding under that visor. I used to think it was some kind of monstrous deformity, a hideousness he was trying to hide from the rest of the world in shame. But now I wonder: what if it’s immaculate beauty? A pure truth that pours from his face so strongly and boldly that he knows he had better hide it. Because the world isn’t ready. People don’t want to step up to the plate like that and have to accept the Glorious Love That God Is Giving Them™

I think the desert scene fits into this somehow. It’s when Jesus realizes that people don’t actually want God’s Love. They say they do. They feel it in their hearts and souls. But when it meets them face to face in the flesh their knees knock together and they evaporate like a mirage when you get too close. We wrote this scene out a while ago for the musical. I should have been more careful with how these scenes were arranged before going down there but oh well. Jesus wakes up in the middle of the night truly disturbed next to the Magdalene. He realizes then and there he has to leave. Gets up, throws some things in a bag and kisses her softly goodbye, possibly for ever. He goes off into the desert to find his own death, because his life isn’t what he meant it to be.

Gram Parsons fits into this as well. Emmylou Harris is his Mary Magdalene. Love Hurts. Boulder to Birmingham. Supposedly he went off to the desert - I think Joshua Tree - on a regular basis. He would “take mushrooms and look for UFO’s” and somehow on one of those trips he just up and died. There’s even a semi-miraculous story about his body disappearing like Jesus:

In a story that has taken on legendary stature, Parsons’ body disappeared from the Los Angeles International Airport, where it was being readied to be shipped to Louisiana for burial. Maintaining his alleged promise, Kaufman and a friend managed to steal Parsons’ body from the airport and, in a borrowed hearse, drove Parsons’ body to Joshua Tree where they attempted to cremate it, by pouring five gallons of gasoline into the open coffin, and throwing a lit match inside. The site of the cremation is today marked by a small concrete slab and is presided over by a large rock flake known to rock climbers as ‘The Gram Parsons memorial hand traverse’.

I just found this thing I wrote a couple years ago with the word “desert” in it:

The ravine ripped through the desert. The clouds crackled across your clenched jaw. The spackle on our hands sparkling in the moonlight. Come closer, she whispered, and disappeared. Oxygen masks fell to our ankles. The weather warmed. The night crept in and held our hands. Lovers lowered their guards. Fingers slipping through knotted hands, rotten wet with age. Apples ripped from branches and flung themselves at us. Hungry years lay before us. Windows cracked, blistering in the heat of your smile. Teeth like tornados exploded from his face. Chocolate dripped from his wings.

I must have seen this all coming even years ago, even before I knew her. Trying to fit keys into tumblers. I wrote this too before I ever met you. Encased in these are all my ideals about love and utter sadness, my two favorite things:

Brackish water filled our cups. The marsh-maids sweet upon our lips. Herons came and stood guard around where we slept. Arms interlinked to keep at bay the ice queen upon the sea. Smells sweet. Crabs clacking from the rocks. One leapt up, blinked and was gone. Tulips came to us and bowed their heads in reverence. Miniature men made us shoes. Small hands moving too fast to see. Kings came and buried themselves in the sand up to their necks. Fish darted through the air among their hair. Forming crowns of seaweed. A network of royal oracles. Talking heads to talk to the tide on our behalf. Look at how they love us. Look at how they serve us. There are men who would kill to be where we are. The grail laying between us. The smoke of luxury burning in the distance. The wind comes in to congratulate us. No one really understands what we’re doing here, do they? But they feel the power bent in our bows, pointed at the moon. The nutrients of near death. The calcified relics of saints who sank here. Where are their bones I wonder, as you brush the hair from your face.

The fire loves us and stares back at us. Thoughts swirl out like sparks from our campsite. The rocks glow red and green until the ground swallows them. I lay down on the embers and try to think back. She was standing there like a weathervane, pointing away and then back again. White shells lay in piles at her feet. They came to us in canoes, wearing Truth in their hair. Lizards leapt over their oars. Liquid flame splashed across their backs. She smiled, stooping down to lift me up.

See that’s what I mean about God getting caught up in his own Creations. He gets super stoned by smoking the whole universe at once and is like, “Holy shit! I made that?”

At least in this video they leave together:

Oh wait, no they don’t. Fuck that. Here, maybe we can redeem that with this video:

I mean both of them are ridiculous but she does eventually show up on stage after all. I have seriously watched this video a hundred times over the past few months.

Based on old notes it looks like one of the scene ideas I was kicking around was that when Jesus encounters the Devil in the desert it is actually Mary, or looks like Mary. Sounds about right. Or it could be that Mary herself is the first of the actual Temptations which must be overcome. Actually, I think that is roughly similar to the plotline of The Last Temptation of Christ - that he gets rescued off the cross, *doesn’t* have to die, and gets to lead a normal happy life with a family.

The biblical desert is not so much a geographical location–a place of sand, stones or sagebrush–as a process of interior purification leading to the complete liberation from the false-self system with its programs for happiness that cannot possibly work.

Jesus deliberately took upon himself the human condition–fragile, broken, alienated from God and other people. A whole program of self-centered concerns has been built up around our instinctual needs and have become energy center–sources of motivation around which our emotions, thoughts and behavior patterns circulate like planets around the sun. Whether consciously or unconsciously, these programs for happiness influence our view of the world and our relationship with God, nature, other people and ourselves. This is the situation that Jesus went into the desert to heal. During Lent our work is to confront these programs for happiness and to detach ourselves from them.

Jesus appears in the desert as the representative of the human race. He bears within himself the experience of the human predicament in its raw intensity. Hence, he is vulnerable to the temptations of Satan. Satan in the New Testament means the Enemy or the Adversary, a mysterious and malicious spirit that seems to be more than a mere personification of our unconscious evil tendencies. The temptations of Satan are allowed by God to help us confront our own evil tendencies. If relatives and friends fail to bring out the worst in us, Satan is always around to finish the job. Self-knowledge is experiential; it tastes the full depths of human weakness…

Satan first addresses Jesus’ security/survival needs, which constitute the first energy center… Affection/esteem constitute the center of gravity of the second energy center. Everybody needs a measure of acceptance and affirmation. In the path from infancy to adulthood, if these needs are denied, one seeks compensation for the real or imagined deprivations of early childhood. The greater the deprivation, the greater the neurotic drive for compensation… The third energy center is the desire to control events and to have power over others…

In other words, in order to fully activate the HeartChristChakra™, you have to subjugate the drives of the first three chakras: individual identity, desire to perpetuate that identity and desire to re-write the entire world according to that identity. It is a castle upon whose foundation is the bio-cultural concept of the self as an independent entity. The Towers are thrown down by the rumblings of the red and white dragons underneath the castle as Merlin warned the Pendragon. Inability to control his base desire for Igraine leads to Uther’s undoing and the passage of the kingship to his potential heir, the fruit of his base desire. Which maybe means that Arthur is simply the transformation of Uther through that energy center, just as Galahad is the transformation of Lancelot through Elaine disguised as Guinevere - and only then is Lancelot-turned-Galahad able to achieve the Holy Grail HeartChristChakra.

This morning I dreamt of a gigantic pile of sand which we built into at first a sandcastle but which blew up into huge proportions as a ziggurat.

I have lost where I was going with all of this though. Pulled down tangents and offshoots of my own obsessive mythological preoccupations. What I really wanted to say was this: Look, the speed is slowing you down. The purpose of the brain and central nervous system is already to shut out the vastness of all possible experiences in the universe, for the purpose of survival of this one biological body. What these drugs are for is to take the vast panoramic sweep of a beautiful mind heart and soul and reduce them even further down to one tiny narrow dirty little pipe through which stale muddy sewage water is pumped. They call it “speed” and but they know its exactly the opposite: it’s “slow” and it’s what enables you to get through your day and communicate with people who are operating at much slower and more boring frequencies. Throw mass quantities of alcohol on top of that, and a refusal to see yourself as amazing and brilliant and gorgeous and you have a recipe for never wanting to get out of bed.

Your blindness has become a science of silence but I am still drunk on your dreams.

A simple goatherd who I met in the desert told me, he said:

“The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you,” he said. “They’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and…and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”

I guess then they must be freeing me of my attachments. I should have known by the omnipresent cackling of hyenas over the past month, waiting for the Lion to falter. I didn’t walk out on you; I just made concrete what had already happened. The holiest moment I have ever experienced though, O God, was sweeping infinitely small shards of glass from your hair and neck like tiny diamonds crowning you celebrating your beauty and the simple fact that we both escaped unharmed and I would have given my life for yours and now I have so use it appropriately or not at all. The curves of your back in the red light of our bed wings of a dove descended from Heaven upon me to awaken me once again to who I truly am and I bow weeping and trembling before your savage beauty, O God. But take my life as fuel for your funeral pyre.

changes in sex drive, depression, diarrhea, dizziness, dry mouth, emotional instability, fatigue, fever, headache, high blood pressure, indigestion, insomnia, loss of appetite, mental disturbances, nausea, nervousness, overstimulation, rapid or pounding heartbeat, restlessness, stomach and intestinal disturbances, unpleasant taste, weakened heart, weight loss

god dont grant me success grant that i might fulfill your will for me and for those whose lives intersect with mine