In the Blink of an Eye

“Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” 

—Matthew 5:48 

Carlton Pearson was a Charismatic preacher in Tulsa, OK. From the time he was a boy, helping others find salvation through the word of Jesus Christ was all Carlton Pearson ever wanted to do. Based on a spiritual revelation, Reverend Pearson lost his church and was denounced as a heretic by preaching what he calls the "Doctrine of Inclusion". In this interview with NBC's Greg Morrison from the documentary “To Hell and Back”, Rev. Pearson describes his moment of epiphany: 

Announcer: There was a news story on about the refugee crisis in Rwanda. 

Pearson: And you saw these African people—mostly women and children walking slowly back trying to come home. There was no light or life in their eyes. It was a horrible thing for me to see. Swollen bellies and skeletal bodies, emaciated... and then the babies looking at the mom and the mama looking out in space. It was sad. And I'm sitting there with my little fat-cheeked baby and my plateful of food, watching my big screen TV. A man of God, a preacher of the Gospel, and Evangelist, and I'm looking at those people assuming that they're probably Muslim and going to Hell. "'Cause God wouldn't do that to Christians," I'm thinking... 

Morrison: They deserve hell. 

Pearson: They deserved hell. 

Announcer: And then, right at that moment, Carlton had his revelation. 

Pearson: And I said, "God I don't know how you're gonna call yourself a loving God and allow those people to suffer so much and then just suck them into hell." And I believe it was the Spirit of God in me saying, "Is that what you think we're doing?" 

Morrison: You heard this voice. 

Pearson: Yes, sir. And I said, "That's what I've been taught" 

Announcer: He talked back, he says, at that voice in his head. 

Pearson: "God, I can't, I can't save the whole world." And that's when I heard that voice say, "Precisely. That's what we did. And if you'd tell them that they are redeemed, you wouldn't create those kinds of problems. Can't you see they're already in Hell?" 

Announcer: Clear as a bell, says Carlton, he heard God telling him to preach this new message, that hell is a place in life, and that after death, everybody is redeemed. 

*** 

When we are guilty of some minor trespass, in our defense we generally cite some variation of what seems obvious, and common sense: namely, that no one is perfect. To say we are perfect in God’s eyes is one thing, but in our culture as in most, to claim perfection is viewed as narcissistic. Even for those of us who are not of any particular religious or spiritual persuasion, the idea that in our present state, that just as we are, we are perfect, seems to violate some unnamed but all too real code or ethic. 

In one of the most heart-rending scenes from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ”, Martha explains why she continually berates and belittles her husband George: “I cannot forgive him for having come to rest; for having looked at me and having said, Yes, this will do…” 

Christian doctrine teaches that all fall short of the glory of God, and that grace is the means by which we are redeemed. Only when we accept Christ as our Lord and Savior can God then look at us and say, Yes, this will do. Most everyone would agree, our relative happiness or unhappiness depends in large part on how we see ourselves. Yet most everything we encounter teaches us to see ourselves as hopelessly imperfect.

In an albeit brief but mystical moment, Rev. Pearson heard a voice that said hell is a place on earth; “mysticism” comes from a Greek word meaning “to shut (one’s) eyes to”. This is not a denial or a life-negating stance, but speaks rather from abundance, expectation or opportunity. One looks away from this, in order to see that. 

If you’ve ever crammed for an exam, or stayed up late with a book you couldn’t put down, then you know this experience. Despite your best efforts your eyes begin to lose focus. You realize you’ve gone over the same paragraph three times and still have no idea what you’ve read. You roll your head from side to side to loosen the muscles in your neck—and then you blink—you shut your eyes to this, and open them to that—and now you can return to the page you were reading, with new vision, and new eyes. 

Parents look with adoration at their newborn child and say the child is perfect. But few if any of us grow up hearing such a message. Perhaps it is our belief that such an affirmation could only create a monster, a being that is little more than self-will run riot. And yet, it is often those whom we call monsters, who tell us they cannot recall a time when someone looked at them and said, this will do. 

For most of us, mysticism is something far removed from our everyday lives, and few of us ever have the kind of epiphany that Carlton Pearson did. But I suspect we can even go the Reverend one better—hell may be a place on earth, perhaps, because we see ourselves only as imperfect. 

Shutting our eyes to that and opening them to this, a new way of looking at ourselves that says, yes, this will do—perhaps that would be the existential equivalent, of blinking. 

You are all listening to me now. It is not unlike the sound of crickets singing to me over a cool night air. Everything changes in a blink of an eye. You don't even realize how much. You are about to learn.

My name is Pedro, and these are my secrets. I am one of The Illuminati, and therefore I am beholden to oaths that cannot be broken. Therefore, I must ask that you keep the information I share with you here a secret, both from your government and other agencies operating outside of the government. This world draws us to it because we love a game. We love knowing that the hunt is on and we now know our prey.

Maybe right now you are thinking, "You know what, I WILL share this information with the government. I WILL show that talking-out-his-ass-half-mad-preacher motherfucker just how stupid he really is." I understand you on this, I really do. My name is Pedro, these are my secrets. You will start to learn them now. Very, very, slowly. It is our process.

Maybe that doesn't concern you. Maybe you are one of those "take off my hat and dance under the stars" types of idiots. You don't even know. This world of yours is filled with secrets. I know some of them. I do not know them all, but what I am about to share with you is a breaking of my sacred oaths. Know that, and you shall be free. Amen.

Look, it isn't a big deal. It is in many ways, but I can make it simple at first. Imagine that this world you exist in is just a clever manipulation designed to keep the accursed from realizing they are already doomed, they just don't know it yet. Now, imagine what you imagined is the reality and you will start to get a handle on it. You feel that shift cable running between your legs? Just how much is it vibrating right now?

And that is the basics, really. I am an agent with knowledge of the existence and nature of both places, this as a play setting for us to act out our sick impulses on each other, by using an advanced form of puppetry, and our place, where we moderate our disputes, release our anger and jealousy, and exist harmoniously. The price of that is this place, where no matter what you do, someone is going to push you down a road that will lead you to where you are in the weeds and forget all about your knowledge of both places and think of our home existence as nothing but a dream. And when we push you down a road in this created reality, this oversized aggression management play system, you then shift into an alternate reality where everything changes, with each switching of tracks, to become just a little bit more desperate and awful of a world than the one you were living in, but otherwise very much the same.

And this is your first lesson. Grade: Passing

I wouldn't worry too much about what the grades me. You want a passing grade. There are no bonuses for high, self-righteous scores meant to prove your loyalty to the most literal interpretations of our documents. It is better to understand them as allegory, the myths that they are, not as the secret guides to finding the home world they had always existed as.

You are part of us now, but you are so far from complete. We will get you closer to completion with each level of testing that we do on you. It is now that you are being tested. Reading this is testing you. It is testing your patience and it is testing you mentally in ways you cannot fully comprehend in your play set monkey costume. Poor, pathetic "humans," as we call our AI-rich playthings that are giving us such good boosts of various brain chemicals that we've decided to let the project continue indefinitely.

Don't call your superhero friends. I've seen them in their movies. They are weak. They always resort to violence as a way to solve problems, no matter what those problems are. This is driven by the free market system, because the movies need to sell tickets, and people don't want to pay good money to see a guy in a superhero costume having a conversation with some dude, and then he de-escalates that person. No one is buying tickets to that, they want to see action and blockbuster fight scenes. The free market model is not stable. It not only tends to maintain traditional beliefs, long after those traditional beliefs have become irrelevant outside of learning from the stories of those myths. The convergence of systems comes from when we maximize the potential for teaching compassion and empathy to our people if we use our model interaction system to reflect those behaviors while disallowing the bad. Right now, both the good and the bad, as you might interpret them polemically, are in flux. Either can impact different individual pawns on our game table. The way a person is affected by emotions caused by our manipulations becomes explosive, it gets you a lot of points on the table, but be wary. The best players know that you need to tweak a pawn just enough to bend him or her without breaking him or her. Some of the greediest players in our history are the ones who left the homeless people you see all the time. They burnt them out to where they could no longer feel emotion, and then they were no use to the owner. The owner took a financial hit as well. His stable life was wiped out in the blink of an eye. The players kept doing nastier and nastier things to the pawn, but they'd get no emotional reaction, and they were so obsessed with winning that they kept trying more and more combinations until they finally gave up.

That is how it goes. You have to play the game smart. Your aggression and jealousy lead you down a dark path. That dark path can lead to a dark place. It is better to just have fun with your pawn in the time you have. Why always push beyond the existing limits? The human pawns have this as part of their nature. It was unintended. They have a desperate need to push beyond the existing limits, to fly higher, go faster, or be more powerful than any entity in the known universes.

You don't believe me? Eat your hat. How did that taste? I bet it didn't taste like salad.

Say, for example, in the near and eventual future, some dude gets it in his head to make my words into a religion. This may have already happened. It may have looped on you and might now be in the previous loop, which is over the concentric world. And therefore, this idea, of its own existence in the nature of things, has created the world itself as a manifestation of the damage to his mind done years ago during a suicide effort in which he was too scared to cross over, and decided to go back, not out of some epiphany where it all made slow but deliberate progress towards fulfillment, but because you were terrified of the desert. It was designed to be terrifying. All obstacles in your reality can be overcome. The angle of difficulty for achieving that goal can get extremely acute at times, but nothing can exist on the board without it serving a purpose. An obstacle which cannot be overcome, even by resignation, serves no purpose in our manipulations. It is too static.

An obstacle which cannot be overcome within your reality is what we call the doorway. It leads you into another theatre of manipulation. It fits completely with the afterlife you imagined would be waiting for you if you lead the life you chose to lead.

You are no better than your function as an emotional urinal for my people. We get angry, we get annoyed, we want to take our frustrations out on someone? We come to the game, in my world. You are the game.

Knowing this isn't going to solve the problem. Even though I am bound by sacred oath to protect the secrets I am revealing, and to protect them with my life, I cannot free you from it. You are a pawn. The only difference is that you will realize it from this day forward. And once you understand, you can benefit from playing the harp strings of an ethereal roller coaster.

That was your second lesson: Grade: Barely Passing (enthusiasm was down)

You can't imagine what it feels like for us.

No more lessons. You have been informed.