Words of God (Back to the Drawing Board?)
Stories We Tell Ourselves, or Stories We Are Ourselves, Epilogue
The last morning, the storyteller awoke with a final question on his lips. “Am I really storyteller? Or am I a story being told?”
It’s been a long time (15 weeks) since this series began, with a slow amble about movies and things, including a quote from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 journal, advocating for the UN as “a force for world civilization”:
Now that knowledge is in the hands of everyone, all people, all Nations, television and satellites have forever made it impossible for one group to manipulate knowledge of what is happening; World television is bringing this vital knowledge to everyone without being diminished. . . . The United Nations can serve civilization well and deserves the chance to be it. THE WORLD STATE (Projections 3, editors John Boorman & Walter Donahue, p. 5).
I wonder how Francis (with whom I share a birthday, Coppola was 85 on Sunday) feels in 2024, as the UN is busy creating the seemingly quite real threat of World War 3, via its skullduggery in the Ukraine, and while its illegitimate baby sister WEF/Davos is waging a war on “disinformation” (any narratives that don’t conform to its own official story), in which, for example, criticism of Israeli genocide = antisemitism, and a literal Neo-Nazi UN proxy army in the Ukraine = fighting for freedom.
Back to Bereshit
A few days after Francis’ sad-sack shilling for the New World Order, he wrote this:
All material things are actually events. A certain moment in a certain structure of atoms organized into molecules, i.e., a pattern of electrical charge, a modulation of energy, a surge or drop—but not a thing you think of as holding in your hand, like a metal cigarette lighter. I guess we perceive these events as things, as a code to live by and work with in a material world. . . But so am I an event. A chemical event; an electrical event; a molecular event; a genetic event; a cultural event; a sexual event. . . . and so on. . . . What we call the material world is one of the many ways that energy is working itself out, dispersing itself (ibid., p. 9).
This quote (which took 14 weeks for me to get to) was probably the original inspiration for the subtitle question: “Stories We tell Ourselves, or Stories We Are Ourselves.”
A human being is an event in spacetime, albeit akin to one single word inside a sentence, within a paragraph, in a chapter in a book with neither (visible) beginning nor end.
We are back to Bereshit in a woods, and to the eternal question: with no one there to hear it, record it, or report it, how do we know there is a sound?
And why does it matter?
If the Holocaust narrative were somehow to be shown tomorrow to be a lie, what sort of seismic shift might that cause in the collective psyche? Wouldn’t such a lie, on so massive a scale, constitute an evil potentially as great as any holocaust?
To offer up an infinitely safer example, let’s compare the possible lie of a planned extermination of six million Jews—and the provable lie of Conspiracy and the Wannsee conference as the locale for that alleged plan—to William Goldman’s hugely influential Lord of the Flies. This seminal work is one I studied in school, and it has, through artful fiction, persuaded generations of readers to adopt a similarly bleak view of human nature as has the Holocaust narrative. It is a view of mankind that, put simply, is the exact inverse of the Christian view that we are made in God’s image.
It is a viewpoint that has us firmly of the devil’s stock.
Distortion of reality—cognitive warfare—is not only the means of such psychosocial engineering psyop, it is also their end. Because those whose reality has been hijacked, end up fighting to defend the same institutions, agendas, ideologies, and beliefs that enslave and oppress them.
Isn’t that the ultimate oppression: to be living in service of a lie?
Back to Job
In the book of Job, 19:23-24, Job laments: “Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were graven in the rock forever!”
Little did Job know. Or did he? Certainly, whoever put those words in Job’s mouth knew what they were doing. Perhaps this is the first recorded case of postmodernist irony, found in (the oldest book in) the Tanakh?
A living story? According to what James Joyce called MaMaLuJo (the four gospels, but especially Jo), this is precisely what Jesus was: the Incarnation of the Word.
In The Book of God: A Response to the Bible, Gabriel Josipovici asks: what can bridge “an unbridgeable gap between a consciousness which is devoid of meaning and an unconsciousness which is fully meaningful and ‘alive’”?
His answer is, what we might expect from a writer: “What bridges the gap is writing.”
Josipovici cites Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, as a book that is “less about spots of time or moments of true being than about uniting the lost fragments of the body through the act of writing which tells of the dispersal of such fragments” (emphasis added). The Bible (Hebrew and Christian), he argues, “works in rather the same way: it makes accessible to our daily selves a memory which is alive, which is quite other than the historian’s memory” (p. 150).
This is an entirely separate question from that of whether or not the Bible is “the word of God,” historically accurate, true wisdom, or a social engineering tool designed by Plato or other ancient sorcerers (or a bit of all these things). Josipovici makes this clear, when he cites the Bible in the same “breath” (chapter and verse) as more recent, less canonized works of fiction.
If God is the word, then any word can be God’s.
Back to Lucifer
As I wrote towards the end of Seen and Not Seen, in Rudolf Steiner’s view, Lucifer (a.k.a. Prometheus), having blinded our spiritual senses to give us freedom, gave us the gift-curse of imagination (the ability to invent stories), by which to then divine the truth we could no longer see.
Or (Satan’s snare): so as to circumnavigate it indefinitely.
Christianity expresses profound desires and suggests that they can eventually be fulfilled. The Hebrew Bible refuses that consolation. The deep argument between the two may then rest upon the question of whether that fulfillment is bound to be a fake, a denial of reality, or is the expression of a reality which we persist in refusing to see (Josipovici, p. 89).
Whether Lucifer’s gift is leading us closer to or further from reality depends on whether we are using the stories we imagine, tell, and are (or soon become), to fulfil our fantasies or to face our fears.
If our only wish is to face our fears about God/Reality—as in the case of Job—then, and only then, is our happiness assured.
Back to the Bible (and the Jews)
Why are early Bible stories replete with characters pretending to be someone they are not or hiding who they are? Jacob pretends to be Esau; Joseph hides his true identity from his brothers; Leah pretends to be Rachel so Jacob will take her to wife; Tamar pretends to be a harlot so her father–in-law Judah will give her his seed (and ensure the continued line of “the Jews”).
Does this ancient literary tradition continue to the present day with the widespread stories about a hidden Jewish elite, tricking their way to world domination?
Whatever we may think about the Old Testament, the stories in there are a cut above what we consume now on a daily basis (and even pay to do so). And we are what we consume.
Insofar as the stories that consume our time possess our consciousness without inspiring it, we have become addicted to a medium that is devoid of a message: style, with only the illusion of content. We have lost the capacity to notice this, however, because the media itself is enough to sate our appetites. And mostly, we forget to care about its source.
The future promises a perennial mainline of electric dreams, downloaded straight into our brains via electronic media. We no longer sit around a fire and listen to stories of the tribe, but instead stare into flickering devices and allow our consciousness to be colonized and absorbed into a virtual hive, a veritable jungle or metaverse of counterfeit meanings.
Our machines now define for us what it means to be human.
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