Cracks In Reality

Jordan Peterson again. This post is going to get weird because prophetic dreams is a topic I have some knowledge of. Vox Day turned me on to the prelude of JP’s “Maps of Meaning”.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-reluctant-messiah.html

The preface is an autobiography of how Jordan Peterson became infected with supernatural corruption and death-spiraled into a worst-case scenario of how to NOT explore the supernatural. It is most educational. I start on page 9:

My religious convictions, ill-formed to begin with, disappeared when I was very young. My confidence in socialism (that is, in political utopia) vanished when I realized that the world was not merely a place of economics. My faith in ideology departed, when I began to see that ideological identification itself posed a profound and mysterious problem. I could not accept the theoretical explanations my chosen field of study had to offer, and no longer had any practical reasons to continue in my original direction. I finished my three-year bachelor’s degree, and left university. All my beliefs . which had lent order to the chaos of my existence, at least temporarily . had proved illusory; I could no longer see the sense in things. I was cast adrift; I did not know what to do, or what to think.

As I covered in my recent post about JP, this is typical of a Godless man who faces the consequences of Godlessness. For whatever reasons, he neither submits to God nor embraces rebellion against God and so finds himself adrift. I thought this was the root of his newfound popularity.

But now, I think that popularity also comes from JP’s experience with the supernatural. God has been absent for so long that people are desperate for some, any contact with the Divine, and this is going to expose a lot of people to seriously bad shit. Christ would have me prevent this so I offer myself as an alternative guide to the likes of JP.

I’m a Christian mystic, just a dreamer of small accomplishment. No Lotto numbers. But I’ve taken some strange turns in life and might be helpful. For this article, I’ll give a perspective on what happened to JP, my interpretation of his dreams and how one can take precautions if he finds himself suffering a similar fate. If there’s demand then I can show a proper gateway to the supernatural. God is real and has given us access but Christian mysticism is an entirely optional, poorly defined field of theology. You don’t need it. It won’t make you happy. But if people are going to explore the cracks in reality anyway… sigh.

Buckle up.

JP accidentally exposed himself to the occult while visiting a prison:

Some of the prisoners, who weren’t dressed particularly well, offered to trade their clothes for mine. This did not strike me as a great bargain, but I wasn’t sure how to refuse. Fate rescued me, in the form of a short, skinny, bearded man. He came up to me . said that the psychologist had sent him . and asked me to accompany him. He was only one person, and many others (much larger) currently surrounded me and my cape. So I took him at his word. He led me outside the gym doors, and out into the prison yard, talking quietly but reasonably about something innocuous (I don’t recall what) all the while. I kept glancing back hopefully at the open doors behind us as we got further and further away. Finally my supervisor appeared, and motioned me back. We left the bearded prisoner, and went to a private office. The psychologist told me that the harmless-appearing little man who had escorted me out of the gym had murdered two policemen, in cold blood, after he had forced them to dig their own graves. One of the policemen had little children, and had begged for his life, on their behalf, while he was digging . at least according to the murderer’s own testimony.

This really shocked me. … I experienced a recurrent compulsion. I would take my seat behind some unwitting individual and listen to the professor speak. At some point during the lecture, I would unfailingly feel the urge to stab the point of my pen into the neck of the person in front of me. This impulse was not overwhelming . luckily . but it was powerful enough to disturb me. What sort of terrible person would have an impulse like that? Not me. I had never been aggressive. I had been smaller and younger than my classmates, for most of my life.

Exposure isn’t possession, merely exposure, therefore it’s something that can happen to both Christians and non-Christians. It’s a taint, a connection. An unnatural compulsion that ‘isn’t like you’ after a soul-disturbing incident is how it usually turns up. Not permanent. That’s how you handle it. Resist the impulse, focus on something healthy and remind yourself that the compulsion is temporary. It should pass in a few months at most.

Don’t convert to Christianity just to cure exposure. Probably it won’t work; worse, it’ll work, you’ll lapse back into Godlessness and then you’re stuck if it happens again. Kinda like antibiotics. You should only become a Christian when you believe God is real and you want to accept Christ’s offer.

The most common instance of spiritual exposure today is teenage boys wondering if they’re homosexual. What with all the junk the schools teach these days, it’s almost inevitable that homosexual feelings will crop up during the awkwardness of adolescence. Don’t stress over it. Just wait patiently and don’t feed those feelings. A few months of reminding yourself that sodomy is unnatural & unhealthy and chicks will be hawt again.

What you must not do is embrace the exposure. That’s what JP did.

I went back to the prison, a month or so after my first visit. During my absence, two prisoners had attacked a third, a suspected informer. They held or tied him down and pulverized one of his legs with a lead pipe. I was taken aback, once again, but this time I tried something different. I tried to imagine, really imagine, what I would have to be like to do such a thing. I concentrated on this task for days and days . and experienced a frightening revelation. The truly appalling aspect of such atrocity did not lie in its impossibility or remoteness, as I had naively assumed, but in its ease. I was not much different from the violent prisoners . not qualitatively different. I could do what they could do (although I hadn.t).

This discovery truly upset me. I was not who I thought I was. Surprisingly, however, the desire to stab someone with my pen disappeared. In retrospect, I would say that the behavioral urge had manifested itself in explicit knowledge . had been translated from emotion and image to concrete realization . and had no further “reason” to exist. The “impulse” had only occurred, because of the question I was attempting to answer: .how can men do terrible things to one another?. I meant other men, of course . bad men . but I had still asked the question. There was no reason for me to assume that I would receive a predictable or personally meaningless answer.

At the same time, something odd was happening to my ability to converse. I had always enjoyed engaging in arguments, regardless of topic. I regarded them as a sort of game (not that this is in any way unique). Suddenly, however, I couldn’t talk . more accurately, I couldn’t stand listening to myself talk. I started to hear a “voice” inside my head, commenting on my opinions. Every time I said something, it said something . something critical. The voice employed a standard refrain, delivered in a somewhat bored and matter-of-fact tone:

You don’t believe that.
That isn’t true.
You don’t believe that.
That isn’t true.

The “voice” applied such comments to almost every phrase I spoke.

I couldn’t understand what to make of this. I knew the source of the commentary was part of me . I wasn’t schizophrenic . but this knowledge only increased my confusion. Which part, precisely, was me . the talking part, or the criticizing part? If it was the talking part, then what was the criticizing part? If it was the criticizing part . well, then: how could virtually everything I said be untrue? In my ignorance and confusion, I decided to experiment. I tried only to say things that my internal reviewer would pass
unchallenged. This meant that I really had to listen to what I was saying, that I spoke much less often, and that I would frequently stop, midway through a sentence, feel embarrassed, and reformulate my thoughts. I soon noticed that I felt much less agitated and more confident when I only said things that the “voice” did not object to. This came as a definite relief. My experiment had been a success; I was the criticizing part.
Nonetheless, it took me a long time to reconcile myself to the idea that almost all my thoughts weren’t real, weren’t true . or, at least, weren’t mine.

Yes, hearing voices in your head is bad. Doing what they say is worse. I don’t mean to categorize this stuff but at this stage, the spiritual corruption is infesting you and not likely to leave. The only way to handle this level is to ask for help because you yourself have lost contact with reality. Go to the Catholic Church–we Protestants are unfortunately deficient in this area–make confession and take the priest’s referral.

As a general rule, you shouldn’t confront the supernatural solo. There are Things out there; why else are you exploring, except that you hope to find one? If you wouldn’t SCUBA dive alone then why swim in stranger tides alone?

I began to dream absolutely unbearable dreams. My dream life, up to this point, had been relatively uneventful, as far as I can remember; furthermore, I have never had a particularly good visual imagination. Nonetheless, my dreams became so horrible and so emotionally gripping that I was often afraid to go to sleep. I dreamt dreams vivid as reality. I could not escape from them or ignore them. They centered, in general, around a single theme: that of nuclear war, and total devastation . around the worst evils that I, or something in me, could imagine:

Before going into this, dreams are the simplest level of supernatural contact. That’s because most dreams are your brain sorting the day’s experiences for storage. Unnatural events and feelings tend to ‘loom large’ in comparison with eating your usual breakfast cereal. Dreams are the most likely moment you become aware of what you can’t really process with your senses… or what you can’t process with your conscious mind… which is their main usage in exploring the supernatural.

Such a rationalist, Western explanation. Eh, I’m a product of my culture.

What this means, for practical purposes, is that the first, safest step in exploring the supernatural is to keep a dream diary. See if you can match dreams to events or recognize any recurring symbolism. If your dreams begin scaring you then change your course. Job 33:14-18 is relevant here even for unbelievers.

First Dream Interpretation

My parents lived in a standard ranch style house, in a middle-class neighborhood, in a small town in northern Alberta. I was sitting in the darkened basement of this house, in the family room, watching TV, with my cousin Diane, who was in truth . in waking life . the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A newscaster suddenly interrupted the program. The television picture and sound distorted, and static filled the screen. My cousin stood up and went behind the TV to check the electrical cord. She touched it, and started convulsing and frothing at the mouth, frozen upright by intense current.

A brilliant flash of light from a small window flooded the basement. I rushed upstairs. There was nothing left of the ground floor of the house. It had been completely and cleanly sheared away, leaving only the floor, which now served the basement as a roof. Red and orange flames filled the sky, from horizon to horizon. Nothing was left as far as I could see, except skeletal black ruins sticking up here and there: no houses, no trees, no signs of other human beings or of any life whatsoever. The entire town and everything that surrounded it on the flat prairie had been completely obliterated.

It started to rain mud, heavily. The mud blotted out everything, and left the earth brown, wet, flat and dull, and the sky leaden, even grey. A few distraught and shell-shocked people started to gather together. They were carrying unlabelled and dented cans of food, which contained nothing but mush and vegetables. They stood in the mud looking exhausted and disheveled. Some dogs emerged, out from under the basement stairs, where they had inexplicably taken residence. They were standing upright, on their hind legs. They were thin, like greyhounds, and had pointed noses. They looked like creatures of ritual . like Anubis, from the Egyptian tombs. They were carrying plates in front of them, which contained pieces of seared meat. They wanted to trade the meat for the cans. I took a plate. In the center of it was a circular slab of flesh four inches in diameter and one inch thick, foully cooked, oily, with a marrow bone in the center of it. Where did it come from?

I had a terrible thought. I rushed downstairs to my cousin. The dogs had butchered her, and were offering the meat to the survivors of the disaster. I woke up with my heart pounding.

In the context of JP’s preceding autobiography, the interpretation of the dream is easy enough. JP had a normal childhood… single family home in small town America, bucolic and safe. His cousin was the Holy Spirit of Christianity. He’d grown up with her in the family but didn’t consider her an intimate–a cousin, as he said, but very beautiful. He had an aesthetic appreciation of Christianity. She died when she touched the television, a symbol of information and modernity. His faith in Christ was killed by his faith in Science, which he found to be in violent opposition. (The electrocution.)

JP’s safe, ordered life ended instantly. He lost the entire world he’d known when God died to him and never saw it coming. Nothing remained but his basement: his hindbrain, a human animal of needs and fears. A few fellow ‘survivors of Christianity’ offered him inedible beliefs and philosophies to fill the gap left by the demise of his worldview. They were unpalatable and in real life, JP found the atheism which had killed Christianity for him was itself an inedible, barren wasteland.

Dogs are a very common dream symbol of demons. Upright dogs resembling Anubis, climbing up from the depths of JP’s subconscious, offering cooked slices of the Holy Spirit’s corpse… like I said, an easy interpretation. The violent death of his cousin followed by the violent death of his entire world is a common problem for early-stage Communists. They assume the consequences of Christian morality are a natural state of the human soul, cut away Christianity in favor of Godless humanism and are then horrifically surprised when men turn into despicable monsters instead of unchained saints.

Searching for this interpretation, JP comes across Jung:

“The psychological elucidation of. [dream and fantasy] images, which cannot be passed over in silence or blindly ignored, leads logically into the depths of religious phenomenology. The history of religion in its widest sense (including therefore mythology, folklore, and primitive psychology) is a treasure-house of archetypal forms from which the doctor can draw helpful parallels and enlightening comparisons for the purpose of calming and clarifying a consciousness that is all at sea.”

Let me digest this for the reader: Philosophers offer questions. Theologians offer answers. But Jung and JP both lack belief that God is real, therefore they treat religion as a “cargo cult that they know won’t work but they’ve exhausted every other solution”.

Second Dream Interpretation

My interest in the cold war transformed itself into a true obsession. I thought about the suicidal and murderous preparation of that war every minute of every day, from the moment I woke up until the second I went to bed. How could such a state of affairs come about? Who was responsible?

Not a dream, but being infested with corruption meant he was certainly an unwilling participant in the greatest Cold War ever, the unseen war for souls between Christ and the Devil. He probably used the USA-Russia Cold War as a proxy for the one he couldn’t rationally explain.

I dreamed that I was running through a mall parking lot, trying to escape from something. I was running through the parked cars, opening one door, crawling across the front seat, opening the other, moving to the next. The doors on one car suddenly slammed shut. I was in the passenger seat. The car started to move by itself. A voice said harshly, .there is no way out of here.. I was on a journey, going somewhere I did not want to go. I was not the driver.

JP was searching for meaning, trying one vehicle (symbol for philosophy, solutions, ways to make it through daily life) after another. He inadvertently tried Evil and Evil trapped him and took over.

If you don’t get Christian help when hearing disembodied voices then at least get help when your recurrent dreams tell you your life has been hijacked by the voices. At this point, if you still refuse to admit God is real after realizing the devil himself is in your driver’s seat then nobody can help you. You’ve made your choice, JP. You chose to explore what it meant to be evil, were noticed and did what the voices told you to because the alternative was submission to Christ Jesus.

JP is not the first academic type I’ve seen be spiritually corrupted. The previous was Arthur C. Clarke. I read a lot of sci-fi when I was younger and never really “got” ACC. You probably watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and had similar what the hey? reactions. That famous quote of his: “Any science sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic”? That was not a comment that all apparent magic has a rational basis. That was Clarke justifying his worship of demons. Read his book Childhood’s End, no doubt in your local library within reach of little kids, and see if it doesn’t disturb you on a very deep level.

A couple last thoughts.

College campuses are becoming nexuses for unclean spiritual activity. The people running them are deranged enemies of Christ and casual sex is a notorious transmission vector of spiritual corruption. If you choice of career requires a college degree then don’t have sex while you’re there and if you won’t believe Jesus is real then at least believe the darkness is real. Stay away from the darkness.

If you want to explore the supernatural then why are you not a Christian? You think you can be spiritual Switzerland or something? That’s an obvious lie and the proof of it is that exploring the supernatural at all is extremely difficult for us. How will you fight off a shark if you can barely swim? Humanity is not spiritual Switzerland, we are spiritual Poland. Desirable and indefensible. We WILL be conquered, either by Christ or the Enemy. Your horse cavalry is nice and pretty and against the Wehrmacht, totally worthless.

Look at all the gods on offer today. Do any of them care more about you than Jesus? He shed His own blood to rescue you from your self-destructive ways! Are you holding out for a better deal than that? Don’t be stupid.