Consciousness

and time

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

~ Ford Prefect to Arthur Dent, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

You may be curious that I am starting an essay on the topic of consciousness with a quote and a graphic about time. Recently, I was reading an essay on the “Doug Casey’s Take” substack by Matthew Smith and it occurred to me that if we are going to examine our assumptions about reality, we really ought to do so in a thorough way. My first instinct was to mention that there is a just God who loves us and wants us to be free. This thought led to a few “Notes” on the same topic, such as “God loves free will. He made so much of it.” I wonder if I can tag

Matthew Smith

in an essay (which Substack calls a “post” for some reasons not related to fences). Apparently so.

I’m here to talk about consciousness for another set of reasons as well. There has been a lot of nonsense emitted by software billionaires in recent years on the topic of “artificial intelligence” or as they like to say, “AI.” I am not one of those who feels that software billionaires are going to enhance your sovereignty.

In fact, some software billionaires, like Elon Musk’s buddy Peter Thiel are now widely recognised as threats to mankind. In this matter, Thiel is dwarfed by some measures by truly terrible people like Bill Gates.

Now, I am not a billionaire but I do know quite a lot about software. I’ve worked in what used to be called the software industry. Wrote my first code in 1978. Learned UNIX at the same time. Worked on anonymous remailers. Listened with amusement as Nena sang about “boxing the software” just before the nukewar. Began teaching email encryption tech in 1992. Did a gig as a professor at a community college and then at a number of private schools. Worked in the digital gold industry well before it was, briefly, fashionable. Built a fortune in gold-denominated stocks on a private venture capital stock exchange that I briefly owned and operated out of Vanuatu. Lived through the destruction of e-gold and Liberty Dollar by corrupt government actions in 2007. Watched with interest the discussions related to what became Bitcoin on the agora chat on Anarplex. Did quite a lot of work with Bitcoin and Litecoin before they were fashionable. Helped co-found a cryptocurrency project in late 2017. Was an early adopter of any number of privacy technologies.

Artificial Inanity

Like many other people in software, I’ve read science fiction all my life. My brothers had a very large collection of Heinlein, Pournelle, Asimov, Niven, and Robinson. I myself have a considerable collection of the same, plus Stephenson, Hogan, Clarke, Saberhagen, Laumer, Smith, and Gibson, among many others. Naturally, I’ve been aware of the idea of artificial intelligence my whole life. When I was still very young, my parents took me to the cinema to watch the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrik and Arthur C. Clarke. Later, in the actual year 1984, I was delighted by its sequel, “2010: The Year We Make Contact,” with the delightful John Lithgow nearly as funny as he had been as Dr. Lizardo in “Buckaroo Banzai,” released that same year.

HAL 9000 was a self-aware computer software system that “went crazy.” In the companion book to the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” the makers of the film mentioned that they took the letters IBM (a nearly extinct business enterprise that used to make punched card readers as the Computing Tabulating Recording company a century ago and now does data systems for war profiteers and mass murderers in Mordor on the Potomac - hat tip Skip the Free Rifleman) and subtracted one letter from each to get HAL. We were told in the “2010” film that HAL 9000 went nuts because it was given conflicting instructions about secrecy and finding the truth about a very ancient artefact orbiting Jupiter. What I’m saying is, I have known about the idea of computers waking up and becoming self-aware for a very long time. One of the more interesting treatments of the topic is in Bob Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress from 1966. You’d probably enjoy it.

So when I say that I don’t believe there are any artificially intelligent consciousnesses today in this earthly realm, I don’t mean that I don’t understand the ideas. Nor am I unqualified to discuss the topic. I’ve worked with some of the leading researchers in the subject matter. But I will say that we were about 20 years from having a “working artificial intelligence” when I was a child, and we were about 20 years from having the same thing forty years ago, and twenty years ago, and today. So if you think chasing the chimera is a good idea, well, by all means. Have at. But don’t expect me to wear myself out running after you.

We did, for a time, call the concept “artificial inanity” when it became clear that most of what was being touted in the early 1990s as “machine learning” suffered from the same problem of “garbage in, garbage out” that all computer systems encounter. The fact is, ChatGPT and the other large language models are not intelligent, they are not about to wake up and conquer the world, and they are not that impressive, to me. They emit garbage at scale, but that’s largely because they are “trained” on large volumes of woke garbage. One of the people I work with, Aleks Svetski, has some really good insights into what can be done with large language models. So if that topic interests you, I recommend his ‘stack. He also writes about Bitcoin.

Mechanisticism

Yes, I think there should be a concept called “mechanistic-ism.” It rhymes on various levels with “mysticism.” And it has to be a belief system since it is pervasive in some of what passes for the scientific community in this narrative thread of the space-time continuum and various adjacent threads thereof. We cannot simply write “mechanism” because that’s already in use to describe artefacts. And the fact that mechanisms work is one of the reasons that various people have adopted not only a mechanistic outlook, but a belief that all things are mechanistic. Another reason, though, is that freemasons and other demon worshippers are hateful and evil, want to deny the existence of God, want to celebrate the demons they worship, and want mankind to be tormented perpetually. Mechanisticism is one of the ways they attempt to deny God’s vital role in God’s creation.

Yes. I am in fact creating a new word “mechanisticism” and no, “mechanistic” is not the same concept at all. Mechanistic is the view that living organisms are machine-like, whereas mechanisticism is the belief that all things are machine-like or mechanical or, well, mechanistic. Yes, we are allowed to create whole new words any time we wish, and let the chips fall where they may. (That’s generally viewed as poker chips falling onto the card table, but you can see where it works just as well as an idiom about corn chips or potato chips falling onto the kitchen floor.)

Is this a side track? Why yes it is! Lovely to have you along for this diversion.

English, you see, is a language that we make up as we go along. There is no official authority for what is a word in the English language. There are a lot of style guides put out by deep state scum like the Associated Press, and there are a number of dictionaries that are viewed as “authoritative” such as the Oxford English dictionary. But if you read the front matter in these books, and if their authors and editors are being honest (which used to be taken as a given but has become subject to much pondering in recent years), they admit that they have no actual authority to tell you what is and isn’t okay.

I recognised early on that the “modern language association” style guide and other style guides were a sort of scam. You see, they used to tell you how to write foot notes and were quite sincere in telling you which parts to put in parentheses and which parts to put inside quote marks, and so forth. Then the style guide was changed so they could sell a whole new edition to college students seeking to get through classes requiring “properly cited footnotes.” Oh. So you don’t see nearly as many citations nor even links in my essays than you might like because: ftn. I’m not going to buy the latest style guide and pretend it has any authority over how I footnote things, and I’m not even going to footnote much because you really ought to do your own research. And if you are baffled by search or don’t know the boolean algebra involved, well, cope.

Why isn’t there an authority over the English language? Because of the Norman conquest in 1066. The Normans did a lot of damage to a lot of places, being basically Vikings with a ruthlessness about them. They are the ones who decided that priests have to be celibate. If you read St. Paul’s epistles, he says that a bishop should be married to one wife. Same for a deacon. You can look it up. And, even into the late Renaissance, quite a few bishops and a number of popes had wives and children. But the Normans were inclined to castrate people they didn’t much like, or kill them. So it became obligatory in Norman territory for priests to be celibate. And the Normans who conquered England thought of English as the language of slaves. Okay, serfs or peasants, but they thought of all the conquered peoples in their territories as chattel, attached to the lands they owned. They were not and are not nice people. So why bother having any authoritative version of English when all the royal family and all the aristocracy spoke French? And after the Hanoverian usurpation, the ones who didn’t speak French often spoke German.

If you aren’t comfortable with new words, don’t worry about it. You won’t be comfortable with new concepts, either. But if you view that attitude as a good one, you might want to review the events since, oh, say JFK was murdered by the cia. There have been a lot of new concepts in the last 60 years. So what if you need to learn some new words? Or take a word like “jet” which used to be a shade of darkness and now refers to a fast moving aeroplane. You may need to get used to new meanings for old words. Life comes at you fast, as Ferris Bueller said on his day off. /end digression

So, what is mechanisticism and why should you distrust it? It is a sort of smarmy intellectual nonsense that claims that if you cannot describe a mechanism for a thing, you don’t understand it and shouldn’t be taken seriously. So it rejects spirituality, and that’s a big mistake where the topic of consciousness is concerned.

Spiritual Beings

The theme song for this essay might be Spirits in the Material World by the Police. The music of my youth, by a group that wasn’t afraid to put together their own words when they felt like it. We are in fact not this “coarse matter” of our bodies, as the character Yoda says in trying to teach that odd young man Luke Skywalker.

You are a soul that animates a human body. You are not a human body that “has a soul” as some seem to say. The things you see about yourself are largely incidental, and they change from conception to birth to youth to old age. We even have sayings about our bodies in the popular idiom such as “don’t judge a book by its cover.” People who focus exclusively on appearances might make money in the fashion industry, but I have found many of them to be vain, shallow, and inept in discussions of more weighty matters.

Does the soul have a weight? It’s a question that interested a fellow named Duncan MacDougall. So he decided to make some measurements. I think he used an absurdly imprecise “industrial scale” and apparently had trouble calibrating that instrument. Moreover, he seemed to ignore the fact that dogs, whose deaths he also studied, don’t have sweat glands. Nevertheless, one would think that in the century and two decades since he conducted his experiments that somewhat more rigorous methods might have been tried. There have been a huge number of deaths overseen by hospital administrators all over the world, so they really seem remiss not only in failing to measure the weights of their patients at the time of death, but in administering deadly protocols for profit. Probably due to an overly mechanistic view of the universe.

What we do know is that there is some vital essence to a living person that is missing when that person passes away. A live body is not the same as a dead body. Anyone who has worked with game or pets or livestock knows this fact: the living is different from the dead. Something important goes away, and the corpse is no longer animated.

Many questions arise from this situation. What is the vital essence? Can it be replaced in the corpse to re-animate that body? What if we were to cryogenically preserve the dead body until science had some answers on this topic? Yes, I was interested in cryonics long ago, and it still isn’t exactly fashionable. Yes, as it happens, I believe in the resurrection of the body, and, no, I don’t think it requires the scientific technologists of the future to accomplish. All you need is God.

A Theory of Consciousness

It’s probably going to be simpler to tell you how I think consciousness works. So let’s do that part now. Your body is mostly a system for communicating with your soul. Your soul animates your body but is not primarily resident within your body. Your soul exists in the spirit realm, where it was created by God.

Now, people are increasingly bad with simile and metaphor, so there is some risk when I ask you to imagine God being like an oak tree and your soul being like an acorn. But it’s a useful analogy to contemplate, and conceptually consistent with some of the things Jesus points to in the Bible.

God has, over time, created a vast number of souls. God is connected to these souls. God is connected to you. So God is able to feel what you feel and experience what you experience, directly, as God wills. I believe God is also inclined to free will, so God is not persistently looking into what’s on your mind. The privacy of your thoughts is important to you being able to make choices for yourself, something that the woke bureau rats have decided is a bad thing which they are determined to snuff out. Literally.

Since God is connected to you, you being happy is better than you being miserable. God wants you to be happy because God loves you. God is love. God wants you to love your neighbour as yourself because spreading love and joy and peace is harmonious. Spreading pain and suffering and war isn’t. Demons, of course, like to profit from war, which is why one has to suspect George Soros and Bill Gates of worshipping demons.

Much idiocy has been emitted about the heavenly realm, so we should attend to that topic here, as well. Since I believe your consciousness is actually in another set of dimensions and only reaches through a sort of dimension door to animate your body during the time your mortal body is alive here in the earthly realm, it is a valid consideration for this topic.

People who mock religion and mock God and make insulting statements about the Holy Spirit are sometimes inclined to use phrases like “sky fairy” and “cloud dweller” and so forth to discuss a set of dimensions that I prefer to denote “the heavenly realm.” Probably these are people who aren’t doing a lot of four-dimensional Fourier transforms. Nor are they cognizant of the twelve and fourteen dimension geometries needed to consider some cosmologies that help resolve superstring equations. Indeed, there are people who lack profundity on many topics.

John Bunyan in his criticisms of George Fox wrote that it was impossible for Jesus to be found within since He had to be a man of at least five foot height. Of course, George Fox wasn’t telling us that there was another entire human body within us, but that one could connect to God by listening for God’s voice. Stilling your own voice is sometimes enough to accomplish that goal.

“Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” Psalm 46:10. Notice that “the earth” is a realm we are in. Jesus never once said “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” but “in earth as it is in heaven” because being in an aeroplane or in orbit or on Mars doesn’t change the fact that you are in the earthly realm. You don’t get to heaven on a SpaceX rocketship.

We know from the Bible that God must exist outside of time. Why is that so? God created the heavens and the earth, so God must have existed before creation. God tells the prophets what to expect, and prophecies are fulfilled, so clearly God has a special relationship to time as we understand it. Indeed, most of us don’t understand time at all. Which has led to mechanical clocks and a mechanisticism about time and the universe generally.

How many dimensions are there? At least as many as there are stars in the sky or grains of sand on all the beaches of your planet. There are very few aspects of reality where you find a small number. How many people are there? The concatenation of the lies told by county governments gives us the lies told by the state and national governments, and the concatenation of lies about population from countries around the world gives us a global population figure that is almost certainly wrong. But there are more than two people, more than four, and there might be more than four billion. So why should there only be four dimensions?

Well, because most of the time of your life here in this earthly realm, you can only see three spatial dimensions and you only perceive one time dimension. And how can anything exist if you cannot measure it? Ah, but we measure all kinds of things that don’t appear visible in ordinary light. So why should every dimension have the same manifestation in this earthly realm? Quantum physics works in as many dimensions as you can indicate mathematically, and as few. The mathematics may describe vastly different things in a space-time with one or zero spatial dimensions, but they continue to be valid mathematically. So the real question is: why do you believe that the limits of your perception are imposed on reality? Maybe reality is more complicated than you are able to perceive. And maybe you can perceive more of reality if you would open your eyes and open your mind and stop consuming the propagandistic drivel of freemason operated television studios, but, hey, let’s not lift our expectations of you too high lest we be disappointed.

Among the many problems with mechanisticism, it prevents people from admitting the existence of some kinds of data. There’s no simple mechanism for teleportation, precognition, clairvoyance, walking on water, nor for deja vu. So, naturally, instances of these sort of experiences are regarded as demanding extraordinary proof. But when statistically significant information is provided, as with Rhine cards, by highly qualified statisticians, people like Hans Reichenbach don’t revise their “scientific philosophy” as Arthur Koestler noted in one of his biographical essays on the fellow. We’ve seen statistically significant results of precognition of certain kinds of images, in recent studies, but this information is dismissed because it upsets the mechanistic mysticism. Or perhaps because it reveals truths about reality that demon worshippers prefer to keep hidden.

Consciousness requires a soul. Anything that has no soul is not conscious, and anything that is conscious has a soul. So, does God put souls into mechanisms like robots and computers? I don’t think so. God has those choices, of course, and I have no say. But God really loves His creation mankind. He has asked us to be fruitful and multiply. Men and women have complied for many generations with this request, in part because God made procreation a very enjoyable activity.

Today, of course, demon worshipping filth like Klaus Schwab and Barack Obama want to eliminate seven billion lives, force everyone to adore transgender persons, and criminalise all speech accurately describing fat lesbians. Because apparently lesbians are so delicate that anyone correctly identifying the weight and sexual preferences of one must be put into jail. They are timid, evil, useless parasites on society, based on their enthusiasm for jailing people who simply use words that accurately describe them. It’s a sick and twisted sort of narcissism. But, a digression from our topic of consciousness.

Now, perhaps you think that consciousness doesn’t involve God. That a soul is not necessary for something to take on aspects of ego and self-direction. Could a demon possess an object? I don’t know of any instances, and I would generally say no, but even if there were such a case, it still involves God - all the demons believe in God. They know the truth about reality. And it is hard to imagine a demon wanting to possess an artefact of human hands when there are so many humans around who seem willing to be possessed. May God have mercy on their souls. Amen.

Another problem with mechanisticism is, it requires that memory be stored in the brain. Is it? People have had large hunks of brain tissue removed without removing their memories. So, where in the brain is all this memory stored? Oh, it’s holographic? So if you take some of the brain tissue from one place, the memories are not actually stored there? Huh.

Why would the memories not be stored in other nervous tissue, such as the spinal cord? We have reason to believe that some impulses in athletes, for examples, don’t travel all the way to the brain, but only as far as the spinal cord. The “reflex” actions seem to be quite near where the reflex is triggered. Tapping the knee with that weird little rubber mallet triggers a kicking motion, though apparently not always so strongly as to kick the mallet out of the hand of the degreed professional nutjob wielding it.

Of course, the believers in mechanisticism have to insist that the body houses everything. If there were a soul nearby in the heavenly realm and the body were merely communicating with the soul, through a dimension doorway, then we are more than meets the eye. And the mechanical physicists would hate that, wouldn’t they? They blur the reception of the brain by scrambling parts of it using a lobotomy and say, “See, the brain is all there is!” But that’s not a meaningful test.

Michael Faraday continued thinking even though he was sitting inside a Faraday cage into which no charge could propagate from outside. So there could be no radio frequency emission reaching him, yet there he sat speaking and thinking. But, of course, the cage was a 3-dimensional box, and not a 12-dimensional one. So only the sorts of electro magnetic radiation with which we are familiar were blocked by his cage.

Newton had a very mechanical view of the universe, and postulated a large number of theories about how things move. We refer to these ideas as Newton’s laws of motion. Oh, but the orbit of the planet Mercury? Well, that breaks the laws. So, are they really laws? Nope. Einstein showed how to better calculate the orbit of Mercury, and how the relativistic effects of the mass of the Sun matter in those calculations and, therefore, in sundry other planetary orbital calculations. So why do people insist on mechanisms for everything, when the unseen nature of the space-time continuum shapes orbits? Probably because the mathematics are overly challenging, and the assumption that if you are good at billiards you’ll do fine in orbital “mechanics” is amusing to a certain sort of video gamer. idk

How would we falsify this hypothesis of mine? We would need to devise some experiments to measure the interaction between the soul and the body. We would need to measure things about the body, such as its internally generated radiation in various wavelengths of light, including radio, to see what it is doing. We would need to understand the soul and the body and reality in ways that we currently do not. How do you build a 3-dimensional measuring device to detect information flowing along other dimensions? I don’t know.

But I do think in order to find out, we would need to first shed our illusion that the only dimensions possible are the ones we use to build houses.

A Theory of Time

Some while ago there was a problem in physics. Schrödinger described the problem with what may be a familiar story. The problem is a cat that is both alive and dead depending on whether a quantum event has occurred, and the only way to know is to open the box and observe which sort of cat you have. In his thought experiment, Schrödinger imagined a device that poisons the cat if a quantum event happens, and doesn’t if the event doesn’t happen. The box is not transparent. So you cannot observe whether the event has happened unless you open the box. If a cat jumps out, the event didn’t happen. If there’s a dead cat in the box, you know it did. One of the problems for quantum physics is, the cat is both alive and dead in the case where you haven’t yet opened the box. The mathematics works out that the cat doesn’t take a status unless it is observed. And that upsets a certain kind of mental understanding of reality. Even very intelligent people like Einstein say things like, “God does not play dice.”

A little after Schrödinger, there was another fellow, John Wheeler. He came up with an interesting notion that a quantum event causes the universe to divide, as it were, into two timelines. In one timeline, the event happened and in the other it did not. So there is a dead cat in one timeline, and a live cat in the other. The box never has a live/dead cat. Cats are not indeterminate in the Wheeler “inflationary” universe. But there are a dizzyingly large number of quantum events all the time, and so there are these huge number of timelines with which to contend. So many one would need an entire dimension of cross-time to attend to all of them.

This hypothesis about time forms a basis for understanding the “fabric of reality” on which David Deutsch built his mathematics for quantum computing. Quantum computers are massively parallel across this dimension of time, allowing them to perform calculations in ways that take advantage of parallel cross-time computing. If you are interested in the topic, read David’s book from 1997. The Fabric of Reality is a bit dated, now, but it will get you going in a relevant set of directions. He followed it up in 2011 with The Beginning of Infinity. I believe David began the outline of his first book sometime around 1994 or so, if I understand correctly.

Because of the sundry evils of Jeff Bezos and his filthy communist rag The Washington Post and my view of him as an unpleasant fellow, I shall not link to Amazon very often for books in the future. You can find things there if that’s how you choose to roll. But I am going to stop making it easy for you. So there.

As it happens, I met David very briefly at the home of a mutual friend in Oxford in December 2000. That was a very interesting time for me, as I was invited to some really interesting get togethers because of the work I was doing with Dutch diplomat and lawyer Michael van Notten and our mutual friend Spencer MacCallum on building a free private city in Somalia. (To say that it is a project that didn’t work out would be understatement.) David and our mutual friend are mentioned in the dedication of Jim Hogan’s novel Paths to Otherwhere which actually beat The Fabric of Reality into publication in 1996, which goes to show the advantages published authors have in certain aspects of trade and commerce.

Now, are you wanting to have a better understanding of time? You probably don’t have much clarity from this essay of mine, and I’m not shamed by that fact. It is a difficult subject. My recommendation would be Jim Hogan for the light reading, David Deutsch for the heavier reading, and quite a lot of conversations with quantum physicists. If you escape from that set of activities with clarity, please do us all a favour and write about it. Thanks.

If that doesn’t suit your mood, one of the very first really great novels about the multiple timelines or “multiple universes” or “multi-verse” implied by Wheeler’s work is the 1979 book The Probability Broach by my friend the late great L. Neil Smith. It truly sets the stage for many worlds of fiction. Strongly recommend.

Being Present in More than One Narrative

One of the books that mentions The Probability Broach is by Neal Stephenson. Yes, I know, Neil Smith, Neil Schulman, Neal Stephenson. So many Neils, so little time. Hey if you’re going to name your kid something Irish meaning “champion” you won’t go very far wrong. God’s will be done. Amen.

Stephenson’s novel is called Anathem and it describes a bunch of really interesting ideas. One of them is the idea of moving spacecraft by building a really strong structure, a giant steel plate, mounting it on shock absorbers, and tossing nuclear bombs behind it. The bombs go off, the shock wave moves the ship forward, and you have one nasty dirty propulsion scheme.

In their very amusing and thrilling 1985 novel Footfall, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle describe such a ship being built in Washington state at a huge shipyard. Yes, they have the novel’s heroes launch it by detonating nukes in the atmosphere. I did mention nasty dirty. Good story though. Explores important uses for dinner plates in fourth generation warfare.

Anathem is set in what seems to be a distant future, perhaps a thousand or more years from now, and on a planet like our Earth but on a timeline quite a bit different from ours. Smart people are cloistered away from society because we keep building really interesting stuff and then psychopaths and philanthropaths (hat tip to

Margaret Anna Alice

for that essential portmanteau of our time) use our inventions to do terrible things. These cloisters are built in different parts of the world, and always with a clock as a centre piece of the community.

Stephenson’s protagonist lives in a cloister which has clock-driven gates. The main gate opens once a year. Other gates open every decade. And one important gate opens every century. Depending on how interesting the smart person is, they may be in the cloister for a long time. Rather than the term “cloisters” the places for the monastic lifestyle of the smart people are called, locally, “maths.” And they study a lot of really interesting mathematics within them, some of which is written up in detail to advance the story. It’s not all ballistic trajectories, either. Some of the most interesting mathematics relates to directed acyclic graphs, which are something of a foil for pretending that information flows easily from some directions in the multi-verse and less easily in others, if at all.

One of the heroes of the story is a very elderly monk who has great knowledge not only of mathematics but of temporal engineering. He lives in a thousand year mathematical cloister. He and his cohorts spend quite a lot of time chanting and these chants have power over the worldline they inhabit. Which makes much more sense if you’ve heard the traditional Latin mass celebrated with Gregorian chants.

Rather than posting a bunch of spoiler alerts, I will simply paraphrase a quote from this one elderly gent, to the effect that he is, at a critical juncture in the story, conscious of his presence in several different time lines. This particular aspect of the story directly reflects the reality in which we live. It is possible to move your consciousness across time lines as

The Starfire Codes

author Demi Pitchell knows.

It is also possible to be present in more than one time line or “narrative thread” at the same time. And, to add to the complexity, quantum time lines don’t only split whenever there is a quantum event. They also condense together into smaller numbers of narrative threads for a lot of reasons. God provides. Praise God. Amen.

Wedding Feast of the Lamb

6 And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

⁷ Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.

⁸ And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.

⁹ And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God.

Revelation of St. John, 19: 6-9

Much more of the coming marriage supper of the Lamb shall be said, both as it approaches and as it is happening. At this time, it is important to say that the bride is the Church, the body of the believers in Jesus Christ.

A wedding takes place when the bride is of age, mature, competent, well above the age of reason, and capable of taking on the duties of an adult. If you feel that events lately have been very rigorous, as if you are being tested, then consider how great is the blessing for those who are called unto the marriage feast of the Lamb.

Long ago a fellow named Seneca said that fire is the test of gold as adversity is the test of good men. Remember that gold is purified in the fire and the dross is burnt up. Be thou gold. May God bless you and your family. Amen.

Eternal Father please help us to free the slaves, stop the wars, and end tyranny. Please help with guidance, resources, ingenuity, endurance, fortitude, and patience. Please show us the little fires so we may pass by them. Please bring love into our lives so we remember what we have to live for. Amen.