Many people feel that God needs no explaining; indeed, they feel that to bring God down towards purely human reason can but result in rolling God in the dirt of analogy, and that we shall end by producing a mud God of materialism tempting people towards idolatry. But, speaking strictly for friends, and myself, God does not seem extremely self-evident. Even though He may have touched us, we still need to reach out and touch Him - yes even if it means probing His very material traces. For those who find it hard to imagine that people exist who cannot reach out in some immaterial and mysterious manner and transcendentally perceive God, we beg your indulgence. But, just for the purpose of this book, suppose that there really are people who see little or no solid evidence of God. Suppose, just for a moment, that there is no God in the imaginations of some people. Suppose there are persons who are trained to think only in materially based, cause and effect relationships. How would you go about demonstrating God to them? Well, it is probably wise to start where the materialist's mental set is, because you cannot often expect the materialist to suddenly adopt your point of view. So, let us begin to search for God in this persons very own perceived universe, not in our's -- otherwise, we will not often be understood.

By all means, let us complete the intentions of doubting Thomas by putting our fingers, as it were, in the very wounds God received in the person of Jesus Christ, as Jesus Christ himself invited Thomas to so do, giving him full permission: The permission from God Himself! The permission to fully explore so as to discover throughly, once and for all, whether or not God is or is not above death. Yet, beyond all official and formal Christian contradiction [clearly an impossiblity], Saint Thomas the apostle is now living in heaven forever, close to God, who (if there is a God) loves him exactly as much as He loves Jesus Christ. If Thomas can get away with it, then rest assured that we also are free to explore to the utmost maximim of our curiosity without any fear whatsoever!

So, off we go, searching, we will beg the question on the side of the materialist as often as we can and hope that it will all be clear in the end when we discover either that there is, or there is not, a God.

In my dictionaries it tells me that God is Supreme Being. Supreme is just another word for perfect and existence is another word for "isness". God means Perfect ISness or that which is perfect, and perfect means a state of excellence through and through - a faultless state. How can we imagine an absolutely perfect state? Before we can even begin to believe in God we must be able to develop some notion of what God is or might possibly be. If God is, He is Perfect Being. That is nice to know, but we do not comprehend what we say unless we know what Perfection would be similar to in our own experiences. But what can perfection be similar to in this universe that contains nothing perfect? Surely it cannot be like anything we see - if we really see it, because everything we see in the universe is rotting. Every planet, every sun, every moon, is on a collision course with utter destruction. It is just a matter of time. Where then, is Perfection?

Every animal and plant is constantly being bombarded with microcosmic bullets produced by the destruction of cosmic bodies. These radiations penetrate into living bodies and destroy the ability of cells to rebuild themselves in a thorough enough manner to continue living. But how well we know that - for we see all our friends decaying before our eyes, our own reflection in the mirror confirms our observations, our prognosis seems hopeless, we are all corrupting at a very fast pace. After 8O revolutions around the sun or so, our form is utterly destroyed. So where then is Perfection?

A year is such a short time and I only have a few of these spins around the sun; if only I did not have to die, that would be a lot like perfection, you might say. And you would be right. Perfection would never allow itself to be changed in any way whatsoever because it has a form which is able to survive forever. You can't get a better form than that, the form of a wall which repels everything which causes death, or conditions leading to that awful state.

Now we are beginning to see what God is like - what Perfect Being is similar to. It's similar to a man who can protect himself from the bullets of cosmic accidents that enter into his body and wreck his body's repair mechanisms. This man will also be able to figure out all other environmental accidents that might befall him. He would have to know when WW III was going to break out so he could escape the planet. And on the freeway he would be the perfect driver in the perfect car, and his senses so acute that even in the jungle no cat could creep up on him and no snake would lie unrecognized in the footpath until it was too late. No germ would escape from its festering incubator to find an unguarded door into the perfect body of Homo Perfecticus.

Yes, but there is no plainly visible perfect man. We must use our imagination to believe in the possibility of perfection. On what is our image of perfection built? What in this world of destruction is our faith in that possibility based on? What in this whirl of impermanence is our assumption of permanence justified by, but the illusion of permanence? Apparent permanence, then, becomes an important object of our study, for without it we could in no way begin to have a viable concept of God. God is Perfection; and the way we comprehend perfection is to study those things in the universe which appear to be relatively more permanent than most other things seem to remain during the life time of a man. These relatively permanent things become a type of God, that is, God's shadow - A figure of God - an archetype of God. By looking at them we can see what we hope is the outline of God's existence - Perfect Being. Being without the form change which, utimately, is always decay and death.

Our proof of God in this book will concentrate on our own experimental reasoning as to what is the nature of God, based on what the existing structure of the universe strongly suggests is possible, and confirmed in our own human intellect by our own personal experiments, unassailable logic.

Experimental reasoning is another way of saying, "playfully confirming our beliefs by gentle experimentation, and every bit of clear human wisdom, which comes to us, comes to us this way".

But what does Jesus Christ say about learning without direct personal intellectual involvement? "Search the Scriptures, for you think in them you have eternal life; and the same are they who give testimony of me. But you will not come to me that you may have life [john 5,39]!" And what is He saying here but, "Stop reading so much and become directly active in seeking to discover if there is such a thing as eternal life or not? This, no doubt, is exactly like what Saint Thomas did. But what else can it mean except,"Use the reasoning powers God gave you to check the things out that are possible to check out." Perhaps he was saying," You can't stop reading and memorizing the Bible, and all the rules and regulations you think you are finding there, long enough to think for yourself, yet is not meaningful human life itself only the freedom to think for oneself?

Every theory begins with experimental reasoning, and this is the most persuasive method of discovering God. St. Paul writes in Philippians 2:12 "With fear and trembling work out your own salvation". If we learn it ourselves we have really learned something.

Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic theologian, teaches us that we cannot usually learn any other way but to learn by doing it our self. We can learn about something by listening to a lecture, but we can usually only confirm what we have heard by actualizing it with our own hand - making it a reality in our own hearts in our own life in our own way. This is the most common way we learn things. Why else would we have free will except to "learn-by-doing" what is real and what is not? Otherwise we would just file into a classroom and be lectured to for a certain length of time (very boring) and emerge knowing all. This is why God says in St. John 8:36, "If therefore the Son makes you free you shall be free indeed". (Free so we can experiment, and thus learn by doing - and free to make mistakes also). And St. James writes this wisdom, "Don't you see that by works a man is justified and not by faith only? For even as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead!" And what is the work of faith, except to work out what you have heard with the most valuable asset that you possess which is under your control, your human reason. If there is such a state as faith totally without reason, it can only be insanity. It is by reason that we are able to choose. We decide to take this path and not that. If we could not choose one and reject the other we would have no free will. Therefore, reason is the same word as freedom. It is only because we can choose that we have a Self. It is only the exercise of free will that is the work of the self. If there were no potential for the performance of choosing, there could be no Self at all.

A body without reason could not choose and would be as powerless as could be - say as powerless as a tree or an ox or a robot. Therefore, the above concepts are extremely similar if not the same; reason requires choice, choice requires freedom, freedom requires power, power requires consciousness.

We could also put it like this: Reason = Freedom = Choice = Power = Self = Consciousness, and those five are one. We can put this sentence in any order and it still makes perfect sense, e.g., Self=Reason=Consciousness=Freedom= Choice=Power.

It is easy to see that freedom is more important to humans than air, food, or water. So, our way of proof is most excellent, for our work is only to try to confirm the knowledge of God by realistic and polite experimental confirmation on the testing ground of real experience with fear and trembling (fear and trembling means taking a care not to offend or harm any one else's free will power to learn by doing, while you, yourself, are learning by doing).

If you were suffering starvation, would you seek help from a man who had read books about starvation, or would you seek the help of a man who had successfully gone without eating for 40 days? Even so, you will not be at all disappointed by our proof of God, for it is the most fulfilling and exciting and complete method of discovering reality. Why does God make it so we have to dis-cover Him? It is because we are made so that we can learn best by doing. Even if God stood before us in plain view we would not know what we saw unless we asked ourselves questions about our perceptions, putting them to the test.

How do we know what we see? Can we really trust what we perceive? There are many great magicians today who are skillful enough to deceive almost anyone by their cleverness. Even Christians are very often fooled into following after a false prophet. Reason is the best perception of all. What we have seen can be called into doubt, but what we have figured out on the testing ground of real experience, and explained by human reason, will stay with us forever. Satans deceive our vision and our hearing, but what we learn through experimental reasoning will remain part of us. If the truth is glimpsed and not confirmed by personal interaction, it will soon be lost; and if what was glimpsed was not truth, personal interaction and experimental reasoning will soon sweep it away. Jesus said, "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have be1ieved." Does He not mean that we should think long and hard about what we have heard about the existence of God? Yes, never mind the eyes that may go blind, but open your invisible eyes of Reason. Certainly this must be the case for He says, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he hath sent" [i.e., Jesus]. "Believe" as it is used in the Christian Bible, is the same word as "faith", and faith without reason is probably a quick workable definition of insanity. Personal interaction and experimental reasoning is all that He could mean by "work", for He says in Matthew 26, and 33, "Behold the birds of the air, for they do not work, nor gather into barns, or reap, or sow; and your heavenly father feedeth them. Are not you of much more value then they?.. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you". But if this is not enough to convince you as to what he meant, it is made clear in John,6,28-29, "...What shall we do, that we may work the works of God? Jesus answered, and said to them: This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom He hath sent." Just believe, that is all that He is asking. But, sadly, many have believed bravely and faithfully even to death. Many religions have practiced faith without reason quite bravely, and many unpleasent things has happened to them from this application of anti-reason. many failures befall people who give up trying to better grasp that rudimentary knowledge about God, which first came to our ear, which we call first faith. This is necessary because faith absolutely without reason is insanity. We must make sure that our faith is sprinkled with salt (Mark9, 49), and "salt" means, in any vernacular, "criticalness", cf., the slang, "salty".

This is why the Apostle Paul says, "Wherefore learning the word, the beginning of Christ, let us go on to things more perfect, not laying again the foundation of penance from dead works, and of faith towards God". Faith with little reason to support it is called, "baby faith", and can become extremely boring for an adult to sit through more than, say, five times - yes, even deadly boring, one might say (Hebrews: 6, 1). He goes on to say that those who stop advancing in their seeking become like those who refuse meat and hold onto a milk diet way past the time when one should be hanging on to the breast.

The best way to learn is by "working out your own salvation with fear and trembling [Philippians 2,12]". God will love you best if you learn by our method of polite, but real, experimental reasoning. The word "believe" in Greek is "pisteos" and means to persist faithfully until the object is grasped. Let us not give up trying to better grasp God, for baby faith, as cute as it is, is only the beginning of maturity. We must not think there is anything wrong with purely human reason. Without it, development is impossible save for some sort of miraculous intervention.

As Paul says, " For everyone that is a partaker of milk is unskillful ... for he is a little child. But strong meat is for the perfect; for them whom by custom have their senses exercised... [Hebrews 5, 13-14] ". In other words, "remain critical, keep your reasoning power sharp and strong (he doesn't mean that one should not drink milk. Ask yourself then, what does he mean?)."

God makes Himself a mystery so we can discover Him by our own efforts, for we can only learn by participation, We are not robots that we only need a new programming to be inserted into our heads. We learn by doing, that is why we have free will, and that is why we are alive, and that is why we have a mandate from God to uncover the secrets of the universe in our own life, to solve all the mysteries of God by opening the doors of mystery that were put there by God to be opened by us because we cannot fully know the mystery unless we solve it ourselves with our own hands using free will power that was given to us for this reason alone. Why else would we have free will? Why else would it be necessary? We are gaining experiences useful to last forever with God in heaven. God made the mysteries - the secrets of the universe - to be solved by those for whom they were made. For solving a mystery is hands on work, and such personal experience facilitates learning greatly, implanting it legitimately and permanently in our minds. While speaking on another subject, a Catholic pope said words most encouraging - if I may remove them from the original context - here they are:

"Mysteries revealed by God cannot to harmful to men, nor should they remain as treasures hidden in a field, useless. They have been given from on high precisely to help the spiritual progress of those who study them in a spirit of piety. For, as Vatican Council teaches, reason illumined by faith, if it seeks earnestly, piously, and wisely, does attain, under God, to a certain and most helpful knowledge of Mysteries [i.e., mystical mysteries].

(From Mystici Corporis by Pope Pius XII.) If Catholics can confess the importance of reason, imagine how important it must be!

Consider Pinocchio, he was only a puppet, but his strings were cut and he was given, a little power. Now power is just another word for Free will because power, to be power, must give us the ability to overcome what hinders our desires. If we are in jail we cannot do what we wish - if we addicted to a drug we cannot live as freely as we desire - we lack power. Power is freedom. But one may have the power to choose only from her or his ability to reason. The work of reason is only to choose, therefore it is reason alone that empowers us to be free. Consider how important it is to exercise this faculty! This work of seeking God, which Jesus asks us to do with all our hearts, does not necessarily include earthly labor: Consider the words of Jesus Christ as he spoke to the two sisters - both of them loved by Jesus - after one of them complained bitterly to him that the other  was spending too  much time  thinking on the mysteries of God and His Family and absolutely refusing to work (Luke 10, 41-42): "Martha, Martha, thou art troubled and worried about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary hath chosen the best part which shall not be taken away from her." Does this mean that if we become seekers after the truths concerning the real God we shall be free of work in order to pursue spiritual work? Of course it does! But is this sound advice in this hard-working world we find ourselves fenced into? This is one of the more important things we will uncover in this little book by and by.   

So, Pinocchio travels through life half real, not quite a puppet, not quite a boy. When he learns obedience to sanity, so that he will not use his free will to compromise the free will of others, then he will be translated into a real little boy. He makes many mistakes, but at last he accomplishes obedience. He worked out his own salvation with fear and trembling. The Apostle Paul says it is similar for us. That is why we have free will. "Now I see myself in a mirror dimly, but after we are translated we shall see as we are seen by God [Says, St. Paul--1,cor.Ch.13,12]. "When we can handle it, we will be given the intellect of God, the Father of the Baptized. And who will teach us these things? Saint Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2:16, that "we have the mind of God" and therefore no man can instruct us in divine knowledge for only He knows how, and it is up to each seeker to discover His (God's) true teaching authority on earth. That's what we are here for, to seek to know God our own way, as we are inspired within our selves (this is true freedom).  

 The entire world is an experimental proving ground for us to learn how to use power. We live in a world of tinker-toys, and we are put here to start building. We seekers can learn no other way at all than to "learn by doing" with loving respect for others who must learn the same way.

When we were children we also had this free will, but not so much. We must first learn to use power responsibly before we are given much. Do you send your four year old to walk beside the highway? Do you give a five year old a 22 rifle for his birthday? In the same way perhaps there is a God who regulates the dispensing of power in this world, and gives more and more as it is possible to be properly used. Consider for a moment that Jesus Christ might be God - if so then these words now make sense. "...Whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required." (Luke 12, 48) "For to everyone that hath shall be given more, but for everyone that does not increase, even that which he seemeth to have shall have be removed" (Matt. 25,29). Confirm your knowledge by experimental reasoning or lose all. What else could He have meant? The more we learn about God, the more we can learn; the more we have the more we get. The more we know, the more we can know. Knowledge builds on itself. At first God gives us knowledge that we cannot explain, so that we will more easily learn how to explain it to ourselves and others.

Don't we seen to be more like Pinocchio than any other mythical character?

But wait: How can I go on talking about God when I haven't even proven His existence yet? Let us return to our first labor for it is not entirely good to speak about God before we have confirmed His existence in our own hearts, for a man without reasonably confirmed personal conviction is like a body without life, the living dead. That is why we all owe it to all men to give them the charity to work out their own salvations within reason. As St. Paul says, "If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity (a liberal attitude towards others) I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal (words without personal experimental conformation), and, if I should have prophecy and should know all the mysteries and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith ("Faith" in Biblical Greek also means 'tenacity' or stick-to-itiveness) that I could remove mountains and have not charity, I am nothing". It stands to reason that we all best have "fear and trembling" with regard to the possibility that we might be impeding another's seeking to  meaning of life, and the whole truth of existence.

The greatest mystery of God is this - if we wish the freedom of movement and peace of mind necessary to uncover the secrets of God, we must work to extend this freedom to all other men who wish to know it, so becoming brothers and sisters to all other seekers, loving them as they were our own self - even though they might be ignorant of our existence or even hostile towards us because of some real or imagined difference. The mysteries of God are too large for a single person to be able to discover them; it will take a community of seekers working together in close harmony to succeed. Consider that one man, or even a medium large group of men, could not have gone to the moon.

It seems like only a child really puts his whole heart soul and mind into asking "why" about God. And Jesus said, "suffer the children to come". Be like a child, expect a clear easily understood answer to your question, "What is God?" Jesus said that we must receive the kingdom as a child. Every seeker has the spirit of divine child (very curious and not afraid to ask hard questions, trusting that God will protect them from the resulting persecutions).

To get a glimmer of what God could be, it helps to start with something our own imaginations can comprehend.

Think about the possibility that there are humans, like us, except that they are everlasting. They could live on and on for they have invented an everlasting life pill, and have total control by devices over all of nature. Their sun will hang in their sky like a perfect spring day forever and there will be no night.

We have no such day and no such pill, but we do have a beautiful spring day once or twice a year, and a full moon at night so bright that we resist sleep and go fishing instead of sleeping, and, perhaps, coinciding with the weather, we feel that we have such excellent health that we enjoy the illusion for a short time that we shall never need to die, or be changed from our mood. Time for a while seems to have no hold on us. So we begin to understand what it might be like to be God.

Time is the opposite of God. In order to be time, it must have a beginning, and an end. That's all right for the project I am working on, for I wish to be done someday with what I started: but it is not all right with me that I, like my project, too, have an end. Perhaps if we understood time we will understand God.

Suppose I build a time machine and travel to the end of time. What do you suppose I would find there? Nothing? No, because there is no such thing as nothing. There never has been, nor will there ever be such a thing as nothing. Nothing does not exist. If you don't believe me look it up in the dictionary. Nothing equals no-thing. No thing at all. Is nothing a perfect vacuum? No, because in order to have a perfect vacuum you will need space and space is space. It might be 5 feet by 7 feet by 4 feet and space always contains time for it takes a certain amount of time to travel through it from one point to another. In order to be nothing it would need to be without space or time. You could not put it into your pocket because the definition of that which does not exist is that which has no dimensions or presence in space-time whatsoever.

Can we have space without time? No, for to have space means one would need to take time to traverse it. Can we have dimensions without space-time? No, because in order to have a form it must occupy space and so time. Time and space are as inseparable as the so called first, second, and third dimensions. There is only one reality. When your time machine comes to the end of time it would find more time. Would it find another universe? No, because in order to have two universes you would need something that was not of either universe to separate them, a wall of nothing perhaps? A wall of nothing is nothing and nothing is not a wall at all, and if the wall is made of something that exists in the universe, then it is just more "universe" and cannot divide what is just more of the same stuff into two different things. You could say that there was nothing separating the two universes. Nothing separates one universe from the 'other'? Then there is no other.

Whatever time is, it is all the same, and has no end to its constant changing, assuming, of course, that there is no God to interfere with what its' "natural" course would be. Time, in this case, is endless mutilation. Time is another word for decay. Without decay there can be no time. Decay marks the progress of time.

If I made a space ship and flew it out to the end of the universe what would I find? Nothing? A wall? What is on the other side of the wall? Nothing? Wouldn't the wall be part of the universe since the universe must contain everything that exists in the way that we must understand existence? So everything is contained in the universe that is subject to time. There can be no wall, or any other kind of end to it whatsoever. The universe goes on and on without end, except that everything in the universe comes to an end - every form eventually disappears, so we can say it already has come to its ends, we can't say any part of it goes on forever or that it ever stops coming to an end.

In fact, from the beginningless Gods' point of view, nothing in the universe that the beginningless God didn't create ever starts or stops. Everything in this universe (lets call it the Zero Universe) never stops changing even for a split zillionth of a second - even for a zillionth of a zillionth of a second, or even to an infinity of an infinity of a second! Everything in this universe (which looks almost like our own in almost every way) never becomes anything at all for any amount of time at all: Therefore, from the beginningless Gods' point of view, there is nothing in this universe that can be considered a "thing" because nothing in this universe ever becomes any permanent thing even for any little time whatsoever, so you see, in order to be a 'thing' that ends, it must be a definite thing in the first place. A "thing" to be a thing must become that thing purely and solely, and not be in a non-stopping process of constantly becoming something else, which it can never ever become because it can never stop. Since it never was ever a "thing" in purity and forever, we can also say that it never really ever started. Look at it from God's point of view, reason will make that possible.

One can only call it the NO thing at all universe - for even this whole universe itself and every single thing in it can never become a thing even though, at first glance, it looks like our universe.

Is anything in this universe ever stable? Does anything ever remain the same for any little length of time? No, it doesn't. Gas and dust swirl together forming balls which become more and more dense as the particles they will be composed of collide into growing spheres, and then the internal weight of the spheres cause them to ignite and become suns which become progressively more dense until they explode or collide, changing back into the original primal gas and dust which disperses and forms the basic building blocks of new suns and planets. Sooner or later, all this returns piece-meal to resembling space itself once again; but it will not stay that way for long, for in truth, it never, ever stopped long enough to be anything. The No thing at all universe without God is in a constant circular state of decay. It never has a moment of peace. It is never at rest. It is never the same anywhere except that everywhere it is in a constant state of change. This universe is a constant process of absolute mutilation. Every form that appears in the universe will lose itself forever in this destructive vortex.

Okay, there is no cosmic wall. Let's just travel through this universe to see what it is like. We will not expect many planets to have life on them because the vast majority of suns are double and triple Sun systems. Galileo once insisted that the planets all circled about the Sun, but he was somewhat wrong to say that because, strictly speaking, the sun rotates around the earth as much as the earth rotates around the sun.

If two bodies in space are the same mass, they will appear to rotate around a common center. Therefore empty space seems to be the center of most star-solar systems.

That is because they rotate around one another. If their weight is similar, or not too one sided as it is between the Sun and Earth, they are rotating around absolutely empty space.

So it is with all other bodies in space. The earth pulls the sun off its center by 280 miles and makes the sun (an un-solid ball of gases and liquids) rotate around a wobble point 280 miles off its center, while the earth; having a smaller mass, is pulled 180,000,000 miles off its center, yet nevertheless, the center of the sun rotates around the earth as much as the earth rotates around the sun, all other things being equal.

In the center of the earth, there is a melted and gaseous core, as hot as the surface of the sun, which is surrounded by a few miles of cooler material upon which we live. Floating above a sea of fire, we live on the crust of a star. Give us this day our daily bread, oh Lord, and forget not our daily crust. And if the earth were bigger, heavier, we would become dense enough to ignite, becoming the second sun in our system. But we already have such a second sun in the solar system. It is the planet Jupiter which is compressed enough to be extremely hot where its surface would be. If it were bigger, it might generate enough heat to melt the ice caps on earth and we might be in danger of drowning.

So, we see how rare it (probably) is in the universe to find a planet in a constant enough temperature range to suppose life, for life requires, above all, a regular environment - constant and peaceful. Man could light up Jupiter using H-bombs to blast a tiny moon into Jupiter's mass - say a stony asteroid about 100 miles in diameter. The impact would ignite Jupiter, for a few hundred thousand years or so, and then we would have two suns like in almost all other star systems astronomers observe in the known universe.

Picture a planet weaving in and out of a double or triple sun system. One month might absolutely zero and the next molten rock. It is hard to imagine life being able to exist on a planet making something like a figure eight around two suns, yet this is something like the normal state of the universe, most stars are multiple suns with sometimes very hot, and sometimes very cold planets rotating around one or the other star, or both.

Life, then, is the rarest thing we shall find in our universe. We won't find nothing on those other planets, as we would in the Zero Universe, but what we find is as good as nothing - lifeless worlds born out of collisions of fire, and soon to fall back into lifeless fire. Space is the bottomless pit - ever onward meaninglessness; the tale of an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing! How, much like the Zero Universe is our own!

Of course we would eventually find a planet with life on it - a planet of a more or less constant environment and temperature range. No matter how rare such a planet is, because, remember, that since nothing does not exist, the universe must stretch on forever because it could have no end, no limits, no walls. Therefore, every possibility that can exist must exist somewhere in that vast unlimited infinity. Therefore, logic demands that we know that there just has to be an unlimited number of life supporting planets, precisely, an infinity of them.

But, speaking of planets, look, there is one with germs starting to grow on it: But soon the germ planet will be burnt up in some cosmic collision or other, and every germ wi1l be burnt up and be exactly as if they had never existed. There is a planet with large reptiles all over its surface - but, falling into it's sun, that's all the further it went. Look, there is one with cities built by a race or large-brained ants - but we are too late for they destroyed themselves by war - and its just as well since their sun was going to blow up in a few years anyway. Some planets we see die before they develop to a certain stage and some after. Some are in the early stages of development, some in later stages. Traveling through space then, is like traveling through time. Some planets are in early stages of decay, some in late. All are headed toward death. Space = time. Time = space.

Suppose there is no God, if so, there is only the universe of constant circular change, the Zero universe. Look! There is a planet of cave men. There is another of homo intellectus - a great race of space travelers. But tomorrow they will blow themselves up in their world War III. So, traveling through space is like traveling through time and time is only decay (Of course, I do not really believe that intelligent beings can really evolve successfully without assistance from some other pre-existent perfect intelligence, for, if you think about it, in that universe that has no beginning, and, therefore, no start, perfect intelligence exists, and if perfect intelligence exists, then it stands to reason that perfect intelligence always existed; but I will prove that this must be the case later).

Wait, why am I so sure nothing doesn't exist, for everything I see comes to nothing? But isn't that because it always was nothing? From the point of view of changeless perfect intelligence, it would certainly seem that way wouldn't it? And why would it not really be that way? For everything I see certainly is not, in an absolutely accurate sense, any particular thing at all, ever!

But, from a contemporary modern human point of View, what possible difference does it make if men build bridges to the stars and make the angels cry by their great world shaking failures, if in the end they sink back into the universal tapioca from which they accidentally arose by some meaningless series of accidents? It doesn't make any difference at all. It was all from nothing and for nothing by nothing, - the tale of an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing, and nothing is all that the work of men ever was. But it's just the form of men that has died, you might say, yes, but form is all there is to a man, his substance is the same as that of an ape or a cow. All matter is made or the same building blocks, only form gives matter importance. I am one form, you are another, but our substance is identical with all other creatures. Shadowy forms are all we are at our best. How can any of these forms hope to persist unless they are generated and remembered by pre-existent perfect intelligence?

Therefore, form is very important to our concept of Self, which certainly has form, but is also weightless and invisible, of course, I am talking about the possible changeless part of a human being, the human soul - if there is one, for what is the soul but the self? And what is the form of it except a series of communications and behaviors characteristic of only one certain individual human person?

Speaking of nothing, lets have a closer look, for I think there just might be something close enough to being nothing to resemble somewhat the title. You have been decaying through time since before you were born. Certain accidents have been befalling you in the form of radiations from space or whatever. These bullets from cosmic collisions are bombarding the germ plasma in your cells and it is being destroyed. Your form is being changed by accidents into a form, which is less and less able to keep itself apart from the dead dirt, and the dirt turns into worms and the worms into birds and toads and grass, then everything into a black hole, then space, then this, then that. This is happening to you right now.

Is there ever a time when this form-changing-to-dirt ever ceases? If I say, "who are you now", it is already too late for you to answer for it is already "then"; is there ever any second of your life that you do not suffer form-change? Was there ever a time when your body was free from decay? Suppose I took the best second from your lifetime, and I cut the second into one million pieces and I took one of those one million pieces and cut that into another million pieces. Would I be able to find that in one of those periods of time, you were free of form changing? No, I would not. You are a total victim of time. There never is a period of time, no matter how small, that you do not suffer decay. You are never free of mutilation. You are in a constant state of inconstancy. You are corrupting forever and, so, there really is no "you" (unless there is some God somewhere whom you have found favor with).

In order to be God, one would need to remain always the same Perfect form, which would be able to keep itself pure and protected from all form-changing influences forever. But, this doesn't at all appear to be the case with you, unless you concede that some part of yourself is an invisible weightless eternal soul. When are you ever the same? Now? Now? No! Never! Perhaps you are relatively the same from moment to moment, relative to, say an amoeba, or a corn stalk, but you are absolutely not the same from moment to moment. You are like a man falling backwards off a ladder with nowhere to land. You are falling through the bottomless pit of space-time with no place to land, no chance to stop. Before I can say that you are absolutely a living fact, don't I have to have something constant and unchanging to point at? What is alive? How can it be alive if it is not ever something even for a zillionth of a second? To be something it must stop changing for at least a zillionth of a second.

But why could you not have an invisible weightless soul? After all, a computer is quite impressive in it's weight and complexity, but more important is it's invisible and weightless program. The most important part of the computer is invisible and weightless; are you not also sort of like a program running a body? But of course, a living program.

How can I introduce you to my everlasting friends when in a few years you will be unrecognizable because of ageing, and perhaps have a completely different personality due to alterations to the brain due to accidental re-arrangements there? If there never is a time when you are unchanging, then you are like every other thing in time. Now you appear to be one form but soon that form will be dissolved into a totally different appearing one.

You are nothing if you are not constant, yet we exist, you intuitively feel, but how can that be? We are substance, but the nature of substance is to be constantly changing into other substances, or one illusionary form or another ceaselessly. But the change never really manifests itself - it is changing too fast to ever stop and be something (except in our imaginations). To really be some thing, it would need to be still for some tiny space of time - but this never, ever could possible happen in the Zero Universe, could it?

To our eyes these temporary forms, swirling in time, suggest existence, they point to the everlasting. But now open your invisible eyes, which are very much like the eyes of God - perhaps identical to the very eyes of God - and they all look like nothing, yes, even to us. Who in the universe gave us such excellent eyes? But see how hard it would be to use them if this depressing thought were all there was to see. It is easy for me to see how you might exist forever in the shape you are now in, but, of course, you would need to change enough from your present form to be able to have the unlimited power at your disposal necessary to keep your personality (i.e., your "self", or your "soul") intact for an eternity. You would need the formulas for an eternal life pill or some such, and an amazing space ship to escape from this universe when it is time for it to be part of it's dead, cold, and dark journey into endless space, which some scientists say will someday destroy it, but ,otherwise, I can see the eternal strongly suggested in your present appearance.

But in reality, if there is no god who is beyond the corruption we call time in order to remember your form and recreate you into an unchangeable state (someone who owns the blueprint of your Self and has the ability to rebuild it from scratch, and keeps this in an impenetrable vault, forever protected from changing), you are nothing, for now can we define something that never ever stops changing into anything that never ever stops changing? Alas, we can only call it "nothing"!

"Re" means "back again" and "member" means to be an "intimate part of", like a member of the family or a member of your body. Therefore "remember" means to "resurrect", - to bring back into the body what was amputated, or bring back a member of an organization who was put out.

Unless someone perfect is keeping a perfect model and detailed set of blueprints on your body and personality in some perfectly impregnable vault somewhere, and has future plans to correct the temporary temporal nature of your self someday, you have absolutely no real existence - you are the most perfect embodiment of nothing imaginable.

But why should I believe that there is this God who can stop all changing, and can stop me from changing, when I see absolutely nothing in the universe which is ever anything long enough to be to called something definite, and not just a relative and temporary illusion of something imagined to be permanent? Why do we even believe in permanence? We have never seen it. Are we relatively real? Relative to what you might ask? Everything is relative only to the idea of God, or Eternality. Even if there is no eternality, we cannot conceive of things unless we imagine that there is such a thing as a real unchanging reality of real substantial forms. In other words, even the way we think, i.e., what we call "thinking", is impossible unless we imagine that there really is something unchanging exactly like a God! That tree you are thinking about - a large and mighty oak upon which you wrote the name of your first love, unless there is something infinitely powerful to make this tree into a thing that is protected from constant and relentless mutilation, it is not really a tree in the absolute sense of that word. It only appears to be a tree because it approximates your expectations of what you imagine a tree should be, but if there is no real timeless and changeless God to make the tree become a real "thing", protected, and somehow stabilized, it is really not a "thing." Therefore, without this imaginary being, which we imagine is not at all subject to the machinations of the Zero Universe, we could not think. Is our thinking based on a fiction? But nowhere in the universe we are looking at do we see anything that ever stops changing and changing, yet we speak to ourselves and one another as if these constantly changing shapes have "arrived" at their final form, and were at rest in secure existence. If there is no God beyond the influence of the constantly changing universe, the real tree can only be a figment of our imagination. But we assume that the things we talk about and remember are real; can it be that this assumption has no lasting reality behind it? Is all our thinking based on an assumption that only seems to be true?

We must assume that the persons we are talking to can maintain their form by avoiding accidents more than, say, a pressed and dried flower. A person can keep his or her personality somewhat intact for perhaps a hundred years, whereas a mountain can be blown up or be bulldozed or volcanoized, or the whole world can fall into the sun, but a man can move out of dangers way and preserve himself even if he has to build a space ship.

But a man only gives the impression of permanence if there is no God to re-member his form, for he never was anything but change - never had a real platform to stand on.

Indeed, we see the mountain standing above the village, seemingly unchanged whilst a thousand generations of men have come and gone. But all this is only an illusion. If there is no God, all things are equally temporary - just ghosts passing each other in some rotting hallway. Yet, apart from eternity, some things seem to be able to keep their relative forms intact longer than others. However, if anything we see is real, or going to be made permanent someday - it is only something totally not of this decay-universe which could make it so, or even create an illusion that anything in this time-space is permanent. Nevertheless, the whole universe gives the impression of permanence: it is easy to imagine what eternal life would be like. It would be like a clear day forever. We have all lived in a clear happy day, and that's why we can see Forever in our wonderful imaginations. Now see how wonderfully correct and resonable our imaginations are.

Now let's try to find out what God is in our reasoning power, you will be surprised at how well we do.

Since nothing doesn't exist, it seems as I look out into the whole universe that I'm seeing everything. But what I see isn't everything. What I see is as close to nothing as can be for not anything in the universe that I can see ever actually becomes any thing at all - not even for a billionth of a second (the only way it could ever began to exists is if something really permanent would throw a mantle of protection around it to enable it to stop changing and changing ad nausium).

As I stand looking at this puzzle, I remember the main teachings of Catherine of Siena, a third order Dominican who became one of the greatest doctors of the Catholic Church. God is all that is and we are nothing she intimated. She insisted that Jesus himself said words to her to this effect. Somehow, what she said must be true, but even though I cannot yet prove that I am anything substantial, being full of variances, I intuitively feel then I am real, for how could nothing be dreaming it exists? Dreaming is something we hope. Most of all, as a member of the human race, I believe that suffering exists. I hurt, therefore I am. How shall I define myself? Where will I find the true center of my being? Since I am imperfect due to the accidents of time, how could I conceive of a Perfect thing with my imperfect mind? The Apostle Paul says, " Now we see ourselves in a mirror dimly; but after we are perfected by God, we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known" (1 Cor. 13,12).

What is this "knowing in part"? And doesn't " but then I shall Know even as I am known", mean that some day St. Paul will know the whole secret of the universe perfectly - the way God knows it? How am I ever going to answer this question in part when only a perfect mind would know the answer in full? Where is my existence when I am never the same from split moment to split moment, and I can see nothing else that is? Nevertheless, I am convinced that I do exist somehow, and I shall find the generator that generates my real existence somewhere. We will find this out here, in this very book.

I believe, as St. Paul tells it to me, that I can know God perfectly in part even though I cannot hold all of that which exists in my mind at one time, - only the great God could really knows anything in absolute totality; however, I can know God through a simplification of His image. Of course, God would have to be the one who simplified his perfect self image for general consumption, otherwise it would not be an accurate enough model to convey such a difficult concept, if only in part, to persons not designed to be able to contain such an overwhelming amount of informations.

What we wish to discover is the authorized abbreviation of God. An abbreviation is a very good representative part of whole. We call such parts epitomes, and here, in this book, we are searching to comprehend the epitome of God: If there is God.

But the only way our intellect can comprehend any part of the world around us is by a representative sampling anyway. Consider here what the word intellect actually means: The word comes from the Greek 'legein' and the Latin 'legere', or the Latin ' intellegere', and is also a form of the Greek word 'Logos',[compare Logic] which is the real name of Jesus Christ as revealed in the first chapter of the book of St, John in the Bible [Logos is a Greek word which can be, and usually is, translated by most English versions of the Bible as,"word", but a strong case can also be made for the translation, "reason"-- compare the word, Logic]. All these words mean, "to choose from among many", or, "to gather together a significant representation of the whole" or "to choose a number from among the whole lot that you find desirable or undesirable", hence, "a well chosen word". The etymology of this word makes for interesting reading, and I suggest the best explanation of this word, which reveals what intelligence really means, and also what thinking and knowing really are, can be found in an etymological dictionary entitled Origins by Eric Partridge, pages 345-348. *1.

*1.Origins, by Eric Partridge, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1958.

Let us get down to the work of trying to comprehend God the best and most thorough way available to us, which is by seeking to discover the perfect epitome, or representative sampling, of God, which is the work that Jesus Christ informs us is a requirement of the faith (read John 6,28-40). Here Jesus tells us that the work expected of all humans, is only to believe in God and His Son. Keep in mind that the word He uses here for 'believe' is 'pisteos' and etymologically means to "persevere". We are told here that the only thing required of us by God, is to keep trying to get to know all about God and His Son. Here Jesus defines exactly what He means by," work", and that is only that you seek to know what God is and is not.

Suppose you knew a man who was the strongest, smartest, richest, most powerful man who ever existed, and he was also a great scientist who had invented an eternal life pill. Now it is his birthday. Everyone in the world is trying to give this greatest of all men something that would make him happy. He already has everything. However, he is powerfully expecting a birthday present. What will you give him? There is only one thing you can give this man that is sure to make him happy. He wants you to try to really get to know him. Wouldn't you be touched if someone cared enough about you to really try to get to know you?

So, that's exactly what God wants you to do for Him - open up your invisible eyes of reason and allow your intellect to grasp who and what and where God is. That is all He asks. Why else would He name His first-born son, Reason? [i.e., "Logos", or "Word" - in the sense of being a meaningful and intelligently placed word, or else in another accurate direct definition, "reason".]

But we have not yet discovered exactly what Saint Catherine (as the Catholics call her) meant by her reference to all that is not God as 'nothing', that will take a while, so please bear with us for a space.

If you tell me there are trees on the other side of the moon, I will believe you. Why? Because I can see that there is the moon, and there are trees, and it is possible to stick a tree into the moon dust, and put a little air and water around it, and there you have it. My criterion for proof in this case is minimal. All I have to do is hear how something could be and I will believe it. If you say to me there is a God, I will believe you - if you tell me how there could be one. On what does He stand? Where does he hail from? What does he eat? And, most importantly, how can perfection create imperfection, since He is the creator of this imperfect universe? Can something perfect cause imperfection? After all, it does say he is the creator of all that does exist. If he created the universe we live it, how can he say it is nothing? Perhaps he meant to say, or Catherine meant him to say, that the universe we live in - including our human bodies, are created to be a figure of nothing, so that, working out our own salvation by learning by doing, we will learn the difficult "skill of discernment" essential for one to be able to distinguish that which exists from that which could not possibly really exist (vanity), and those things that were created to seem to barely exist (time wasters), so that seekers (perseverers, or faithers) might more easily grasp and comprehend the true and only definition of nothing in order to understand how God created out of nothing the non-zero, existing universe (exactly the one you are looking at right now).

It is very important to comprehend those effects nothing ,and near nothing have on seekers, because vanity often is a cause of death and destruction, I don't have to tell you how it does this as all of us know a great deal about it. Just keep in mind that 'vanity' literally means nothingness [see Partridge, Op site, page 756]. Now that we have some idea of the true concept of nothing, we can better understand what God is: let's search the universe to see if in it we might find some trace of God. He would not be like anything in the universe that we have ever seen, so if we find Him He will be immediately recognizable; just now, however, I seem to be without a space ship. All I have it is a pencil and paper and a Parcheesi board game and my experimental reasoning technique. We will stick them all together and see what we come up with. A space ship would be a waste of time anyway - it takes nearly forever to get any place with one and I suspect that God is not so far off as we think. The universe contains everything that is victimized by time. As I think about it, I see everything about it seems to be repetitious. All the stars are made of the same stuff and they all circle around in the same manner according to the same laws, and if I go far enough I'm sure I will find another repetition of even something like another earth.

The universe is very repetitious, rather like a clock. There is no use going on forever through it, for after a certain time of space traveling, you would just encountered the same old types over and over again. If you've seen one star up close you've seen them all. If there is no involvement of something like a God in it, there are only so many possibilities within a region of space--so many blue suns, red suns, White suns, organic planets, inorganic planets, so many temperate conditions on those planets, etc. Even though space is endless, it must become extremely boring because of repetitiousness. You can only go so far before you see the same thing again and again.

We can see such repetitions of all the possible configurations of matter in our large telescopes; there are not many different kinds of stars. So if we go a certain distance we see everything that can be in existence. If we go that distance again we see it all over again. There must be such a distance in the universe and it would clearly mark our universe into regions or sub-universes. Each sub universe must be perfectly representative of the whole universe because it contains within its boundaries all the general possibilities that can turn up (that is, when the scenery starts to repeat itself, you can be sure that from now on you will only see again what you just viewed in the distance you just traveled - I call it a "sub" universe just because it is not so interesting as the very first stretch of the journey through the universe before I noticed the repetitions). Now, I think that there is no beginning of this fruitless universe we have been theorizing about - unless, perchance, God, who wished to slow down the rate of decay in it so that human minds could see the process in slow motion in order to understand it, has altered some region of it. Otherwise we suppose that the rate of decay (the speed of time) would be so accelerated that it would be out of the range of human perception. One cataclysmic upheaval upon another is what you would see in it, until mankind would become like a race of jackrabbits constantly running in order to earn a few more meaningless seconds for our meaningless lives. When a deer hears the sound it does not look for the cause in order to learn about the nature of reality, it runs off at full speed -- if it took the time to identify the source of the noise it would be dead, and therefore be unable to reproduce its calm natured kind, so it is impossible to have a thinking deer in such a place.

Not so with human kind, living in our slowed down universe: Even in the middle of a war we most often have time to stop and think before we make a move. In our case decay, or time, has been slowed down and disarmed - either by virtue of our quick minds or by some thing which created our world by slightly altering it from the total nothingness it was (because of its fast rate of decay) to something which is more understandable and usable than the decay explosion which is so intense as to make everything in it come to nothing within every little non-existent split-second of the non-existent time which God does not bother to chart, since there is not a thing in it that could, with absolute accuracy, be called an actual "thing". No, not even the tiniest measurement of time.

What God does not chart we call nothing, for if is not preserved in something permanent it cannot exist. For something to really exist, it must be placed in God's unalterable consciousness. The "nothing" structure of the universe always is the same -- it only appears to have a form to the human mind which longs for permanence -- an idea placed there, by God perhaps, so that mankind would long for something that was greater than the corrupting universe.

Let us assume that we can create the universe (I'm going to do this to show you that God must Exist). I can't really create that universe that is without God, for whatever it is - and evidently it is nothing, it always was whatever it is or is not, and all that is constant non-stopping nothingness and mutilation and change -- there is not a real thing in it. Anyway, everything in it has never stopped changing long enough to be a real "thing" for even a split-second: But I can't say it has "everything" in it because it really has no thing in it at all, and even it itself is not a thing: Consider, for a thing to change it has first got to be something in order to change into something else. We are not used to talking about nothing as an absolute concept, and so we find it hard to find words which can describe this indescribable state of total indefinitude. The very concept of nothingness means no outline, no boundaries, no definition, or any other sort of delimitation. It is really a no - thing. A no thing can never be, or be an ever has been, or an ever going to be. Nothing is really nothing. It can't stop being nothing by itself. Only nothing comes from nothing. Only a self-existent thing that was not changing, and had never changed, would be powerful enough to make existence out of it. That self-existence thing would need to be preexistent, or God (same thing). So, we see how important it is for us to begin proving or disproving God.

Now, here is where my giant Parcheesi cup comes in handy. I mentally put everything in the universe into my dice cup, and I shake it up and throw it out. Every die (there are trillions) represents a certain possibility, and since I have within my dice cup every possibility, every possibility will turn up. It can't be any other way. When you have every possibility in your dice cup, and you throw out every possibility, then every possibility must turn up immediately; this is the only way an infinity of possibilities could possibly act.

Look! There's a planet of germs on it, there is one of volcanoes - a planet here, a planet there and pretty soon there won't be any of those left anywhere. "What a nothing universe this is", you might say, "everything in it is changing so fast and without any rest at all so that it all adds up to nothing and comes to nothing, and I don't see why we can't call it nothing right now.

But look at the Earth! It has weight. But what is it really but a wobbling ball that changes its shape and weight from moment to moment along with everything on it, and will someday be un-recognizable, no longer being even relatively the same in form, but will end up being a black hole, or a different type of star -- and, inevitably, it will become even dark space itself. What is the Earth that we should consider it real? Perhaps it is only a concept that exists in our minds. It is either a permanent concept placed there by something permanent, or it is an illusion of permanence that we have developed by accident which does not convey the truth of the matter whatsoever, for what I call earth will someday be indistinguishable from the sun -- a boiling churning mass hopelessly mixed up with pieces of the refuges of the rest of the restless, unstopable, universe.

God, what a depressing sight, space is truly a bottomless pit - ever onward meaninglessness, full of the ends of things that never really were or are ever going to be. The whole thing is one decay explosion, and nothing in it really ever becomes anything.

The earth will be everything in the universe sooner or later and again and again. The Earth will become, bye and bye, the whole corruption. It's just a matter of time before the stuff the heart is composed of becomes a part of everything else. Yet how can I say anything out there is? I can't, because it never rests long enough in one form to be. In order to be you have to be for a while -- at least a zillionth of a second. I think that I have discovered an idea something like nothingness, and now I can see how God might create out of nothing, something.

So, let me put all that nothing in my parcheeze dice cup and shake it up -- listen to the remarkable noise it makes -- strange that "nothing" could make such a commotion, it must be my imagination. Still, something is happening in my imagination, but whatever it is does not ever have a definite shape for a definite time. It does not exist as a thing at all. It does not exist in time because it never stops changing long enough to become anything definite. It is a lot like nothing, and it is everything that has never yet been, or ever will be a thing, but it is everything that is formless, timeless, hopeless. If I do create something out of it, whatever I create is not at all like what I created it out of, for if I create something it is real. It has real presence. It has an absolutely permanent form because it is some thing definite. It will not sink back into depthless meaninglessness ever. In short, it is totally different from what I made it out of -- you cannot make a greater difference than the distance from nothing to something. That's all the difference there is or ever could be -- the space between zero and everything. If something is not something, how can it be any thing? If something is not perfectly something, is it anymore something just because it gives the illusion of a relatively slow decay to a rapidly decaying man? It doesn't matter how slowly the grass is turning into a cow, the point is that soon a significant portion of the cow will turn into grass, or dirt, or stars. The real cow can only exist if God takes note of it and posts it on the perfect protected bulletin board of his perfectly protected mind.

Picture an infinity of dice with dots, numbers, and pictures on them on an endless plain.

I am still shaking my dice cup which contains everything and nothing, and all the matter anywhere (an impossibility for I myself would need to be in the cup also, and there could be nothing on the outside of the cup, and we are sure that there is no such thing as nothing. I'm going to make it all appear as if for the first time anywhere! -- A kind of beginning". Here goes.

Out of my cup rolls everything after being all shook up, and every possibility spills on out.

Look! I instantly get back everything I put in the cup in the first place There is a planet with germs; and look -- there is cosmic gas and there are the suns starting to form in the gas by accident. There is a planet with the "intelligent ants that are about to blow themselves up with their world war three, but it doesn't matter much anyway because their sun was going to blow up in a week or two anyway. Those ants are going back to the great gas cloud that made them -- they never were very far away from it -- to be exact, they never were anything but that senseless gas cloud. In fact, they were never really even a gas cloud. It all reminds me of the words of St. Paul, "If there is no God, let us eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die" (1 Cor. 15,32). But even more so, if there is not God we are nothing.

But I do not believe in intelligent ants I only exaggerate to make my points seem simpler. I believe that the only way a thing can become rational is by a great help from a thing already rational -- but no matter, at any rate, I am willing to concede the possibility here because I am dealing with all the possibilities we might find in the human intellect. That, however, doesn't mean that I shall ever find a planet with negative gravity on it. I might, but I have no reason to assume that I shall because such a planet would have nothing in it to hold itself together. Nevertheless, it might be true that there is such a planet, for I can see a man building one of plates of steel held together by some sort of mechanical fasteners with an antigravity machine at it's center. Of course, the only way such a thing could exist is to have been constructed by something rational, and the only thing that could be truly rational would need to be able to live along side the constant mutilation that is the nothing universe. If the universe by itself can accidentally form a rational man capable of such organized and complicated behavior, than out of such a crop of rational Men there must be some in the universe who create an eternal life pill and mastery over all life altering influences, such as exploding suns, germs, stray meteors, etc. So, if there is any rational life in the universe, it means there must also be God, and have been God forever. For in a universe with no beginning, all of it must have been there completely present from before forever, including the complete presents of Perfection or God. After all, since nothing doesn't exist, there never could be a time when part of the universe wasn't there. And if it was there, then there also is the realized possibility of an existing God.

But see, some of that said above can mean that God evolved into perfection. Can imperfection create perfection? That means that, ultimately, imperfection is perfection, and there is nothing in the universe is imperfect. What a great thing chaos would need to be in order to produce intelligent and perfect order. In our case it would mean that everything around us is good, childhood leukemia, Adolph Hitler and the holocaust, the black plague, atomic war, worldwide abortion, and etc. All would be necessary for the production of reason and God.

But this can't be because there never could be a beginning to the universe in the way we are here conceiving of a "beginning". I'll show you what I mean. Now I have tossed out the dice and everything is turning up everything -- seven, snake eyes, boxcars, and fame and failure and shame and childhood leukemia and all the rest. And every thing that turns up is on a collision course with something else so that every cloudy "form" will soon be destroyed and mixed together into great tapioca, unrecognizable, indistinct, unformed.

To an exact scientific eye the universe-without-God is more like clouds in the sky that seem to start to form themselves into a sheep or a man or hills, but never really make it and start to become some other thing. Watching the Zero universe from God's point of view must be like when we lie on our backs on a breezy summer and watch the clouds make pictures for us. Just when you think they are going to turn into something real all they blow away to a different form again and again. Like clouds, we never really become anything. In that respect, perhaps we are like nothing, as Catherine of Siena once wrote.

I throw my dice out, and there the universe is - just like it looked before I stuffed it into my dice cup. Every temporary form emerges and can emerge because every temporary possibility is there, and there is nothing to hold back any temporary possibility at all. There is a planet with germs on it, and there is one with .., but what can be different this time compared to the last? But wait! There is something there I had not noticed before. I went ahead where angels fear to tread and stuffed this something right into my dice cup with everything else. Of course, it's God! That rarest of all possibilities that is the only actual and real possibility amongst all the illusionary possibilities that are no actual possibilities because they can never become a thing, and He is the only thing in the universe that can resist changing into nothing from nothing for nothing. But those days for God are over (not really, but only in my imaginary cup), because to mix up God with the universe would kill God (if you mix imperfection with perfection perfection is no longer) - and so I have killed Him (in my imagination). He allowed me to do that to Him so that I could learn what He is and how He lives. Isn't that why they say that Jesus Christ let them kill Him? Why else but to cause us to seek after him in order to get to know him? Think about it!

I shook it all up and threw it out and it formed again. It let me sweep it up and dismantle it and put it into my dice cup the way Christians say that Jesus Christ let men destroy His Body and then resurrected Himself again to be further probed by doubting Thomas. Look at Thomas there probing, probing, and probing. Isn't he a lot like us? Yet, who is to say that he was not an outstanding favorite of Jesus'? It wanted me to see with my own eyes that it is a reality, and it wanted me to see on what It stood and how It existed and so it let me do that to It. It really strongly desires that I be a seeker. But Jesus says to Thomas, do you believe because you have seen? Blessed are those who believe but have not seen. Again, let me repeat myself, What does He mean by this except the very best way to preceive God is with reason - that is, with ones non physical and invisible eyes--what else? There It is! Since all my imaginary possibilities that are, are all turning. Every imaginary chance that can happen has happened in my imaginary universe, but there is one chance that can happen there that most people don't expect: The chance of no chance, the state of changelessness.

One thing accidentally has turned up on a non-collision course with all the temporary things in this universe. How exceedingly rare this thing must be, for it is a thing, and the beginning of all things that can really exist. It knows how to dodge every meteorite and avoid every other kind of accident. It must hate accidents -- After all, what could nothing be like but one big accident? Nothing would never be able to take it by surprise. No, nothing would never ever be able to take it by surprise! Nothing could never happen to it since every possibility must turn up, so must also this possibility of no possibility, or no chance. Remember, there never was a first moment like this. I am only allowed to stuff God into my dice cup because someone is allowing me to figure it all out by experimental reasoning. I know I will be allowed to do it! Why else would I have Free Will, except that my will be really free?

There never was a big dice throw because the- coming-to-nothing-universe was never created! Remember? We went back in a time machine to the first moment and then we went back further. And what did we find further back than the beginning? Nothing? No, nothing doesn't exist. There never was any such thing as nothing. Therefore there is no beginning, however, if [an impossible if] I could gather up the whole universe and put it in a shaker-cup and shake it all up, and throw it all out again, everything would only turn up as it was before. There is a planet with homo superiorus on it about to have it's world war nine: There is a planet with large reptiles about to fall into it's sun - and so on for ever and ever. Each sub- universe contains all the possibilities that can turn up. Oh, the red suns might be in a slightly different place than they were the last thousand times, but if you want to wait long enough everything will be exactly the same as it was in some previous time. You have only so many possibilities to work with. Nothing else can happen. Keep in mind that since nothing does not exist, there never could be a beginning of the universe except that God could make a beginning. But remember, if you took a time machine all the way back to the beginning of time, and then went back another ten minutes, what would you find? You would not find nothing because nothing doesn't exist, never has, never will. But you will find God because God, and what He chooses from nothing to become "things", are all that really could exist.

God always existed and is all that always existed. There is no beginning of time nor edge of the universe, therefore, in this infinitude of possibilities there must exist the only thing that is possible to be real, the only possible reality among all those dead end possibilities. There can be no other possibility of existence, AS A FACT, unless there is a non-created God to facilitate and maintain existence! Think about it for a while, for it is exceedingly difficult for any of us to talk about nothing or to hear a lot of talk about nothing. Yet, if we are going to discover if or if not there is a God by our own efforts, we must understand the concept perfectly.

But what I am really pointing out here is that when every possibility can happen [temporary and permanent] there must also be the possibility of non-accidental everlasting existence. We can see this and understand this because it is a possibility even with us here on Earth. I cannot seriously doubt that if mankind can keep itself from devouring itself in wars and economic exploitations, that men will someday build eternal life pills and computerized machines to chart out and destroy every accident that could possibly befall the human species now and forever: Then, man would become God! Of course the chances that mankind could do that without divine intervention are about a zillion to zero. Why? Because way before any "beginning" God must always be there. How could it be any other way?

Obviously if there is no God, we are as a good-as-extinct-species; but we would be anyway if there is no God.

If you can see that God (Perfectly self-Protected Eternal Rational Life) might exist, even here on earth, someday, then how can you believe that in all that multitudinousness of Galaxies, and beginning-less time out there, that there wasn't at least one race from before the first dice throw that made it into godhood? Why wouldn't there be a species that didn't cannibalize on itself, and therefore not miss it's great calling? And if it ever happened once, it happened forever because nothing exists that can make it die, and because the universe we are considering is so old it has no beginning. Can you imagine how old that is? If mankind came close enough to an eternal life pill to dream about it and spend money on it, you can be sure that there have been uncountable numbers of other rational creatures that have succeeded. If one of them made it, there is God!

Remember the definition of God we found in a dictionary? God is perfect unthreatened existence. But I really don't want to explain the existence of God by talking this way. All I want to do is show you that there is every chance that God does exist - that He always was and therefore always will be. I can't throw out my dice cup and think that there is no possibility of the perfect combination of elements that produces God, not if I had EVERYTHING in the cup. But there was no dice throw. There is only the structure of everything. If I put everything in my cup and threw it out I would get everything back again. There is no other possibility. So I don't have to put it all in my parcheeze cup. The way it is, is the way it would be after I made my throw.

Now, lets take a look at the way it is so we can see what God stands on, if there is a God. Keep in mind that we still could use a little more certainty. Come to think of it how can we possibly know anything in a universe where nothing never quite becomes anything because it's all made of non-ending changing, and non-beginning changing too! Let us hope, for our benefit, that there is something changeless in all this vanity. What I am trying to say is that even in an atheists evolutionary universe there needs to be a God - by their own logic God must "occur" and once He has "occurred", we see He never needed to occur, ever! But always was, for something cannot spontaneously spring forth from absolutely nothing without any help whatsoever; therefore, it stands to reason that an infinity before the beginning of everything, there always existed something, and that something was God.

Look at It sitting there in It's sub-space, fearing not any thing, because It's own consciousness is the perfect, invulnerable foundation It stands on from everlasting to everlasting. It stands on It's own peace which is It's own awareness of all potential threats to It's perfect being and It's impregnable wall around Itself: It is It's own wall. It subsists by Itself alone.

Observing this perfect person, one can't but wonder why He doesn't leave His own sub-space and travel to the other sub-spaces in order to converse with other everlasting beings. Why should He, since perfect cannot be more than perfect (Reason informs us that there is no such thing as "more than perfect"). Nor can a thing be less than perfect and remain perfect; and since they are all perfectly perfect, they are all, in fact, but one.

When we humans speak of perfect we mean that relative to our own experiences, this or that thing is relatively perfect. To be absolutely perfect is to be changeless and eternal - is to be God. But we do have the word perfect in all our vocabularies: But what for except to point toward absolute perfection or God? But we can see that He already knows who He is, and He can, by computation on the perfect electrical stage of His perfect mind, see that everywhere He is the same. Everywhere He is one. Anyplace you find it, perfection is always and everywhere exactly the same. He has no secrets from Himself. He, in no way, can differ from Himself. Perfect is only Perfect, no more and no less.

If he embarks on the trip to the next sub-universe, He will in no way be surprised at what He finds - not in the least. And the Everlasting Being in the sub-universe He visits will not be at all amazed at His arrival. Not in the least, for they are perfectly one. They have computed when exactly everything is going to happen, when and how exactly, and they (really only He) always knew since before all beginnings. Perhaps there are two or more such perfect spots in every sub-universe, but that there are two is only an illusion, for perfection is always perfect unity, which is truly oneness. If it were possible for you to be absolutely perfect, you would be identical to every other perfect thing, because, in order to be perfect and remain so, one would have to keep perfect track of the entire environment so that it would be impossible for an accident to happen to your Self. Otherwise you could not be perfect. Once you have perfectly cataloged everything in the environment completely, so that you would be in absolute control of the entire universe, so that no tiny germ or even a microscopic meteorite, or even one electron could escape your scrutiny, then you would necessarily be absolutely one with everyone else who could do the same because there is only one reality, and one best way to perceive it and deal with it. Therefore you, if you are Perfect, are absolutely one with everything else that is Perfect.

Perfect, you know, like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit -these three are one. Why are they one? No reason, except they are all Perfect.

Why should God travel a zillion miles just to talk to Himself? He already knows what He will say and what He will hear, perfectly.

Why does God always have three faces (It is called a "trinity")? Because God is a community. Three's a crowd, we are taught. Words starting with "poly" always means three or more. If we examine our language we find we think of three as a completion. It takes three to make a family that has perpetuated itself biologically. If we think about it, all of our concepts - no matter how high and complex - must have a basic root, a sturdy principle, on which everything else stands. Of course that most basic and necessary archetype upon which everything else depends for its existence is the human family structure which (if there is God) God created in His own image ("male and female He created them" it says in the very beginning of the Bible). This is the father, the mother, and the inevitable children, which become useful figures to human thought corresponding to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, which are three "executive orders" in divinity and government which are necessary; such as, the king, his advisers, and the captains, who head the appointed action industries of government. Or, perhaps we can see it as the President, the Legislature, and the judicial branches.

The king conceives the general plan and the congress or senate delegates and perfects the General plan of the father, further polishing it up and finding ways to put it into words so that it can be understood by all. The leaders of various governmental action organizations then execute the plan.

The word of the father is sown into the mother's consideration who gives flesh and substance to the vision of the father, making his words more down to earth, and more practical to the children, who begin to build the fathers notion after it has been presented and explained by the mother.

The father would be like the first order in the Catholic Church (the monasteries). The mother would be like the second order (the dioceses and the sons and daughters are like the Catholic third order whose function in the Catholic Church is to do, most phenomenally, what the father glimpsed abstractly afar off, and what the mother made into a philosophy or a

history or a song or a poem or a story for the children.

The second order is artistically creative and good at explaining scientific observations.

Nothing on earth or in heaven gets done unless it is done by these three steps. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the three angels who visited Abraham? Perhaps you also remember the three orders of angels Thomas Aquinas teaches us exist? In each of the three orders, he teaches us in a most knowledgeable manner, there are another three orders. Every government, it would seem, must proceed by these three steps. Every organization, to be successful, must have those three.

The Bible says that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are the three in heaven, while on earth is the spirit (the vision, the calling, the zeal), the water (an element associated with the mother and with wealth, and, reflectiveness [history], and creativity, as with poetry and song ), and the blood (associated with the sac�rifice and the penance and suffering it takes in order to get the job done, first envisioned by the father, and then taught by the mother.) Also it brings to mind childbirth. (1 John 5,7). The mother, then, becomes the living explanation of what the father expects of the son. Jesus Christ is the perfect living explanation of what we are supposed to become in general. He is called The Word or the Explanation (in Greek "the word" is called the Logos, which word etymologically can be identical to our words "logical" and "reason". ) * 2.

Therefore, it is easy to see that Jesus Christ is the reason and logic of God. Imagine how much God, the Father, loves reason! Think of the second person or the second order as the Chief Senator or the president of the Red Cross, offices we associate with the mothering principle, but we do not consider such people as less manly than other persons at all. The Third Order, for instance, historically is made up of people who have a child like guilelessness and a childlike love of obedience, yet we do not think of them as less manly or womanly than others, for the third orders were the Crusaders of old who died by the thousands in the bloodiest wars on earth in response to a request of Pope Urban II, and other popes, whom these guiless people considered to be the word of God on earth, a living personification who represents on earth the basic plan the father envisioned for us to follow. As the apostle Paul put it, "I beg you to copy me as I copy Christ". The Catholic Third Order is the phenomenalizer (by this word is meant "bringing an idea to a state of action") of the church on earth, just as it is the Holy Spirit, or the Third Order in God, who phenomenalizes and makes real what the Father of Spirits envisions, and what the Second

* 2. Origins by Eric Partridge, The MacMillan Com�pany of NY, 1958, p.347

Person in the Trinity has drawn up blueprints for. Remember, it is the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who overshadows St. Mary. He is the perfect, phenomenalizer who is the finger of God or the doer of God.

But, the Holy Spirit is not an Order of Children, for God has no reason to "work out His salvation with fear and trembling" being already perfect, but it is the Holy Spirit who is the doer in the Trinity. The main action for us on earth, of course, is to learn by doing. When we have learned, we will no longer need to be children in the literal sense; we will be mature doers of the Word of God.

Our father Jacob is like the Third Order, and in some ways it is the most important of the three, as St. James says, "Faith without works is dead"; and he had the most eventful life if hardships are any measure of eventfulness. Remember that in Genesis 47:9 Jacob (the 3rd from Abraham) tells the Egyptian Pharaoh that he has had a much harder time of it than his father and grandfather. The down-to-earth generation has a hard time because it is so close to our universe which is created to be a nothing look-alike in order to help the seekers after truth to practice on it, in order that they might develop strength enough to resist fatal vanity - the powerful pull towards nothingness.

Look into the Catholic Third Order by all means. I think the Catholic Third Order presents a more accurate view of third order states than will be found anywhere else.

Well, if there is a God that's what He stands on, Himself, His ability to be conscious of everything in the universe. This consciousness has a perfect fence around itself to completely keep out death due to accidental rearrangements. That's the first thing you would need to do to be God. God needs to be a perfect government - a perfect community, and every organization needs three parts in order to protect itself from destruction. A tree needs three- root, trunk, and leaf; an animal needs head, body and legs. Organized religion is the only kind that will survive. Organization must have these three divisions in order to proceed. Disorganized religion will not survive. Whoever hates organized religion does not want religion to survive; disorganized religions eventually contradict themselves. A good example of this self contradiction leading to extinction is the Protestant Puritan Church.

If every possibility in the Zero universe that could turn up, turns up, then certainly the possibility of perfect must turn up. The dice cup demonstrates that this possibility has already turned up before I stuffed the whole universe into my cup in order to produce an artificial "beginning" so that mortals might be better able to understand that in an infinity of possibilities, there would have to be the possibility occurring of something immune to accidents or chance or time or decay. For us, all those words mean the same [We are assuming that any imagined "universe" would have a beginning - but let me say again that this is impossible and we are just using this as a "what if" example]. I cannot get more possibilities out of my cup than I put into my cup and I cannot get less. Everything is always equal to everything.

Every combination of dice turns up when you have unlimited chances. I have an infinity of chances because the universe has no end to its gross structure, even though everything in it ends non-stoppingly, no-thing doesn't exist. That is, the universe doesn't end until it comes to God; if there is one He is entirely different from the-universe-that-always-comes-to-nothing-and-never- rests-anywhere-anytime-anyplace, therefore the universe must end and begin with God.

But remember I have, in my imagination, stuffed God in my cup. Now my cup runneth over, for I have captured infinity, and I can pretend that I am creating everything by throwing it all out again. If this were possible then "everything" would always turn up into an infinity of possibilities, including the possibility of something so well protected that it is completely protected from those "possibilities". But remember, there never could have been a first Parcheesi cup dice throw because that would mean that everything had a beginning. If everything had a beginning what was before the beginning? Nothing? No, you know that nothing does not exist (if you don't believe me look it up in some dictionary). There never was a beginning in the sense that there was an absolute start of God and the universe that doesn't exist-that-always-comes-to-nothing.

The only reason I stuffed and threw that up was to demonstrate that in an imaginary universe with a beginning, in an infinity of possibilities, there must needs occur the possibility of a non-changing form. It is a possibility that can exist, and, since we live in an infinity of possibilities, it does exist, therefore there must be a God. Keep in mind that if there ever was one, there is one now, because time has no beginning unless it is a special time, created for our benefit, like the era of the Greek ages for instance. Someone intentionally, and consciously, exercising her or his Free Will, states, "this is when it starts, this is where it ends!" Isn't this exactly how Father created time? What other kind of time could possibly exist?

This kind of time is the only real time there is, like the time it takes a man to mature, for this kind of time proceeds at a controlled and predictable pace. It is a steady rate of decay which contains much information in it. It is capable of teaching us about what God would be like who is (containing neither change nor decay) the opposite of time. The kind of nothing time I have been writing about is chaotic time having no rhyme or reason in it whatsoever, always starting with nothing and always coming to nothing. See, its nothing I am talking about, precisely nothing!

Real time is not nothing, it is only a type of nothing, but, also, it is slowed down enough so that it contains information about eternality or God (It shouts, "I am not God even though It made me!").

In the next chapter we will find out what possible similarities and differences there might be between "nothing" and "time". But I do not want this cup to pass from you just yet. I just want you to note, in passing, the incredible resemblance of the concept "nothing" and the concept of "time".

But now lets look at the sub-universe that appears by way an illusion to surround God. It is not God is it? No, it is not God for everywhere I look I see decay, which is another word for time. And yet it is not nothing, for I can see it, touch it, use it. What is this stuff that is not God and yet is not nothing?

I can't think very clearly of how there could not be a God. It would need be, to support such an hypothesis, that the universe-that-is-everything, is limited in its possibilities, confined by an impossible wall of nothing, so that the easily believable possibility of a conscious being "discovering" all the building blocks of the universe, so as to cause itself to live forever, could not happen because of a lack of space and time. How could there be an end of space and time? But remember, I don't need extra-special proof to satisfy my curiosity. Perhaps someday someone will present me with a theory, which demonstrates how everything does not include God. Until then I must bet my life that there is one, since I suffer a complete absence of experimental reasoning which demonstrates how it could be that God does not exist. How can it be that God does not exist in a field of infinite possibilities? Where is the logical theory explaining how it is that God could not exist? Explain to me how such a state could exist in the universe and I will believe you - I promise. If someone can tell me how, in a field of infinite space, time, and possibilities, there can be no God, I will accept that possibility as truth. Until then, ask yourself, "How could there not be a God?" Let me see the theory that can explain how the universe can exist and yet have no God in it?

But let us get back to proving the existence of God for I realize that I have not yet explained away everything that seems contradictory in my proof of God.

What is this stuff that seems to surround God? Indeed, I myself am made of that stuff, therefore, it will be good for me to find out what it is - or if it is, since I can't see that it really is ever anything permanent for any little length of time whatsoever.

I know that I did not only stuff Perfection into that cup, but all that other stuff too - myself included. If it isn't God, and it isn't nothing, than it must be in between God and nothing. But one thing is sure; it's more like nothing than God. This in between thing must be like the clothing we dress ourselves with to protect us from the extremes of weather. The clothing is dead stuff, but it protects our living skin. It seems to be part of our body much more than the hostile environment which gives us nothing in the way of protection.

Clothing is like housing or tools or weapons. All become a shell that protects our body. I organize my clothing. They all bare my mark on them, and they do what I make them do -- if I were God they would do exactly what I directed them to do, no more, no less. I have made them subservient to my will. They will only move as I wish them to. They are not my body, and they are dead things, but they are servants of my body and, so, a great help to life.

Even my body is dead compared to my will and consciousness. Take your finger for example. If it is cut off and dies you do not miss it the same way you would a friend. The finger is not rational. You do not care much that it is rotting in the dirt. Still it was nice to have it. You trusted it, it was not a threat to your life, and it was useful to you. Still, we will not grieve much over it because it is not really conscious (i.e., never having the potential to ever be able to use logic or reason). So, clothing is to the body what your finger is to your consciousness, both of them do what you direct them to do and if they do not they are part of the hostile environment. Both come between the general environment and me. They can both be an example or rough figure of the place between God and no thing.

But the only general environment that God must suffer is the no-thing which is emptier than a perfect vaccume. If Perfection even imagines a threat to Itself, it is that It should change into nothing - that It should become non-existent (Impossible, because if it ever did It wouldn't have been perfect in the first place.)

The eternal One cannot enjoy the sight of things coming to absolutely nothing. But they never were things at all, at any time, because they don't stop long enough to become anything what-soever.

If so this is truly nothing -- and it reminds us a great deal of our own environment of time, but our environment is like God's clothing, this other environment has no order in it at all--it is not even a shadow of perfection. The process of decay in this no-thingness is so unordered that it is totally meaningless. It really is nothing and there is no other kind of nothing besides this kind of nothing.

Oh, if it looked like anything to us, it would look a lot like the universe we live in. But there is a large but invisible difference, for the universe we live in has been explained and presented to us in such a way that we can understand God and begin to comprehend the structure of the universe. Who can doubt it? We can travel to Mars and blow up a planet and prolong human life if we wish. We are sensitive and conscious, but if nothing else, we can do these things because we are well ordered! We are at least created in God's three-fold image, which is a necessary prerequisite of order.

We know that if there were a God, He would be a lot like us. Created is the only way to describe this universe that we live in; nothingness has been slowed down and organized so that it communicates to us something beyond itself -- it indicates the Perfect Community that is God. Everything about it demonstrates order by showing the consequences of a lack of it. It can be thought of as a place inbetween God and nothingness, but it is certainly more like God than nothing for it definitely exists!

Take Mars for example. There it is whirling around in space, a dead lifeless planet. If we blew it up with hydrogen bombs we wonder that difference it could possibly make? But it does make a difference because it has been named. It means something to us. It is red like a drop of blood in the night. Mars, the mythical chief of war, communicated a lot to us. We even name one of the days of the week after this planet -- Tuesday (means Mars day).

Suppose, I destroyed Mars, it wouldn't be hard. Now it's gone. Or is it? Does that mean we shall no longer have a Tuesday, or a spirit for war? No, because the planet was only a symbol which indicated a greater human psychological reality. But because it once existed because consciousness catalogued it, it will exist forever. The blueprints and reconstruction plans for Mars are safly locked away in God's impregnable vault, and so it can never return to nothing - it will alway remain a thing.

Other things being equal, human perception is the true center of the world -- the way we prefer to perceive the things that are, is the most important way that they exist. Take the sun going around the earth for example. There is nothing wrong with perceiving things that way if we wish to. There it is rising in the east and setting in the west. Strictly speaking, it goes around me as much as I go around it, but my conscious human perception of things is by far the most important mode of perceiving.

The sun is just a shadow of a greater reality - just a symbol of a human psychological reality; it is not worth the life of a single human being. It hangs there in the sky to remind us of the Father, but it is a ball of burning gases, boiling, and bubbling in a most wasteful manner. If we were perfect, we could build our own more efficient sun. The sun is a great tinker toy put there for us to experiment on -- to learn by doing. Someday, no doubt, we shall blow it out.

Oh, I could go on about the moon, how it's such a perfect type of the mother who is the second person in that most basic archetype, that most perfect and basic of all psychological realities -- the human family - the most perfect of all of God's shadows, (His best image here on earth). The Father and the Mother and the children living in peace, are a more perfect figure of God than anything else by far, so the stars are a type of obedient children. Is not this the most important use of the sun, moon and stars? We are not reflections of the stars, the stars are reflections of us. The sun itself, just a shadow of the Pope.

Water, is a type of wealth, for without it nothing prospers, and when there is too much everything spoils or becomes decadent. Everything is a symbol pointing the way for us to learn-by-doing how to be like God. Does not wealth, like water, reflect the heavens? Yet underneath the shining surface there can be a junkyard and a sewer.

Remember what St. Paul told us? "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling". Why else would we have free will except, perchance God is bored with perfection, and is playing a monstrous game of chess with himself?

Take a snake, what is he created for? Couldn't the creator do a better job? What part of perfection does the snake point to? Consider him, he has no arms or legs, and he has a tiny brain and a slow metabolism. What is God trying to tell us by this concoction? Just this, see how well he does for all he lacks; he has one type of apparent virtue which makes him very successful -- fully as successful as any other type of animal. He is patient. He can wait better than all others. Snakes have been known to wait 30 days just outside of a rat hole. He is the symbol that points to the angels of patience. We cannot help but learn from him about the nature of perfection, and how well we will eat and rid ourselves of our enemies if we will be as patient as patient can be. And it teaches us in the very beginning of the Bible that "... the serpent was more subtle [patient] than any of the beasts of the earth which Lord God had made". The fisherman knows what lesson God teaches in a snake, and what enjoyment can be found in patience and subtleness (since, patience can be thought of most accurately as the main virtue of a fisherman). But the fisherman is not a figure (for edification) of a snake, but a snake is only a figure of a fisherman, for the fisherman is conscious and the snake is not and, therefore, as close to being a dead thing as can be. Everything not conscious is just a figure of and a teaching aid for consciousness.

I could go on and on through the list of all the creatures and stars proving to you that everything in this created universe is just a teaching aid -- of course you can see that I could, but Adam already did that, so let us return to more basic principles.

What I have been describing is the universe that is not nothing and is not God. It is in between, if you will. And it is a type of God and nothing. Why does the in -between state exist? In other words, why do we exist, and, the universe we directly perceive? Because we are kept under control by the Perfect Community, God, so that our forms do not ever become lost completely like the universe that always ends up smushed together into an undifferentiated blob -- a whirlwind of decay of total meaninglessness, resembling the lifeless center of the sun and the lifeless cold emptiness of the frozen void we call, "space".

But never mind, I hope to prove here that our blueprints are remembered, so whatever is lost to the void can be perfectly reconstructed anytime, anywhere. Why did God create this in between universe out of nothing? How did He create it out of nothing?

In order to understand, we shall need to see that our temporal universe is very much like nothing. The only difference between nothing and our universe is that we are maintained in a relatively constant state by the only thing that really does exist -- if by exist we mean perfect changeless being. And we do, because we really can't see how a thing can be considered to "be" if it never ever really stops changing into everything else that changes into everything that changes, even for a split zillionth of a second. If it never became any thing that means it is not anything -- a state we call no-thing.

When we look at ourselves we see what nothing is like. I don't really think, as it appears to a superficial examination, that nothing is not much different than our world. Of course it's all the difference in the world, but, anyway, lets pretend that our universe is nothing that has been slightly but sublimely ordered (slowed down so that it can be observed and become a teaching tool for the children). But in reality there is a profound difference between a thing that is and a thing that is not, the profoundest of all differences. Only God IS and there is no is no other (if there is a God) and if there is not God then there is nothing -- It can not be any other way, not by any stretch of the imagination. If nothing does not exist, in a real, definable, and permanent sense, then there must be a God!

We are like a field reclaimed from the jungle at the edge of the Perfect City. We have been cleared somewhat and fenced. We are not at all perfect like the Perfect Community, but we are maintained in a somewhat protected state (total protection would be Perfection). We can only exist because the power of the only person who can truly say 'I ALWAYS WAS" is keeping back nothingness from changing us totally into meaningless changingness.

The "jungle" is trying to claim us. More than anything else, nothing is death. That's why God in the Bible always explains Himself in these words -- as to Moses in Exodus 3, 14 after Moses asks God, "Look, I go to the Children of Israel and say to them: The God of your fathers hath sent me to you. If they should say to me: What is his name? What shall I say to them?' God said to Moses: I AM who AM is my name and you shall say to them: He who IS, sent me to you."

Jesus Christ is also God, isn't He? In John 8,58 we see Jesus the God man saying, "Truly, truly I tell you, before Abraham was made, I am". Remember that St. Catherine of Siena swore that Jesus told her that she was nothing, but that He, God, is who really IS? Without Him Catherine would be nothing. Perhaps He spoke to her like this because Saint Catherine did not clearly enough understand that Baptism was supposed to confer real existence, making one into a real, actual, child in the actual blood family of God, like Jesus Christ Himself, whom the Reborn should look upon as their real flesh and blood eldest brother. Perhaps she was having a hard time believing this difficult concept, as are most other Christians everywhere.

But, getting back to the world God created for us seekers. Persons exist in an in between state because they are maintained in an imperfect condition. They are like nothing enough to resemble the word somewhat, yet they are maintained in a variable changing state by the Perfect Community (God) so that they never lose the relative form of their self. If their body dies then they are remembered in the place of the I AM. In the meantime, they are kept in a semi-permanent state so that they will desire to become more and more permanent. God perfers that people learn well what impermanence means before one becomes permanent.

How are we remembered? Why, in the same imperfect state that we died in. And we will be remembered forever whether in that imperfect state, or a perfect state, because it is forever that is remembering us. Sometimes, He perfectly duplicates our imperfection for a perfect reason. Here is an interesting parallel to what we are saying in the Bible in the Words of Jesus in Luke 20, 38, where he says all live in God, "For He is not the God of the dead, but of the living". For even the memories of God are alive; is there anything stored in Gods mind (if there is one) that is ever forgotten or imperfectly remembered? Even if someday God will change us into something that is not mutilated by time, right now we are maintained in a state of controlled decay in order to teach us by learning-by-doing that nothingness is not good. So, even though the world exists, part of it is a model of nothingness - God created it for that purpose so that we need not always remain less than perfect, even if for a perfect reason, for nature is constructed in such a way that it will always teach us how it be perfectly.

Remember, the main reason for creating the world is to create a manageable model of "nothingness" so all men can learn by doing, working out their own salvation with fear and trembling. The difference between God and nothing is a very important lesson to learn. Just like St. Catherine told us, we are nothing. Yet we exist. We are not nothing, but until we are mature, we are a type of nothing for the edification of ourselves, and all others who would learn.

Like Pinocchio, we have two choices put before us, nothing and everything (evidently we must pass a very simple examination before we are allowed to enter into the infinitely exciting protection that is Heaven).

God created the world out of nothing. Only God can comprehend nothingness -- really appreciate how terrible it is -- so He created the world as a safer, more manageable type of nothingness, so that we might become co-creators of ourselves by learning how to resist vanity -- which is to say, understand nothing, because vanity literally means nothingness.

Just like Pinocchio was created half way between puppethood and humanhood, so he could learn-by-doing by, in some small way, finishing himself off by his own hands -- we can learn no other way except to relate to a real experience - either ours or someone we trust most completely. Evidently it is not aesthetically pleasing to God to program us like robots. He could do it that way, but He preferred to give us the dignity of free-will, which is real power in a real life and death situation.

How did He create the world out of nothing? Bear with me a little longer and I will explain it to you, for I am aware we have some explaining remaining.

We already have a good glimpse of nothing, it is as close to us as some of our most intimate desires - to throw all restraint aside and leap into the vortex of immediate gratification without regard to glimpses of future dangers. God wouldn't care how long a thing kept some relative form or other. His view is only eternal; if it doesn't exist forever it doesn't exist (in the view of the eternal, self-existent Thing. The only way a thing can exist is to exist forever - changeless - or else it never is anything, but is only a part of that which never stops changing into nothing from nothing. As nothing swirls around for no reason (indeed, swirling is too good a word for it, for it is so chaotic it doesn't do anything you could say was anything) - if God does not care, to stop it, it is nothing to nothing to nothing. Nothing changing to nothing is absurdity ad nausea.

As some things float by (indeed 'thing' and 'float' are too good of words for it, for nothing is as nothing does) God pushes them into some pattern or other and elects to remember it always, for there is no memory in God that can ever decay. There is no decay anywhere in God or He couldn't be God. He can't forget anything at all, anything He bothers to see becomes a real thing forever! Therefore, whatever God notices He creates - in reality, on the electrical stage of His mind, which is the sole center of all reality, and there is no other unchanging reality but in Him.

I do not mean to say that nothing is chaos, because chaos is something. It is a mass of confusion especially created to communicate to man a very negative state, which points towards nothing. But nothing is a far more terrible view -- wall to wall meaninglessness -- the bottomless pit, which is an impossible state, because it contains no possibilities at all unless God orders it into existence. Nothing is total despair. It is ultimate depression. Let us hope that God is generating us forever in the inbetween place, or even perhaps someday in a place closer to His state, very much closer indeed; perhaps He would adopt us and we would become total members of His Family, and so that is where we will live - right there in the Family House with Dad, and perhaps He will let us use His last name for our own. Actually, this is the case and I will explain it later, perfectly. in the meantime, keep in mind that His full name is Father God, and there is Jesus God, and Holy Spirit God - Three separat and distinct personalities.

Now, the next question we have to answer is why He made this plain where imperfection is made to be real and is kept in an imperfect state for a perfect reason by a perfect and absolute Power. It can only exist because its spectrum of changing's is maintained by God, otherwise we do not exist and there is no thing permanent -- but you must be aware by now that this is an impossible state. Something must exist. Really exist, or else ultimately, everything would be impossible.

Remember, there must be a God, as I have demonstrated, and in order for something to exist perceptibly, it cannot be nothing, because nothing is always imperceptible -- like looking at the physical form of a man (he looks just like nothing because he can't stop changing) without considering that he is being generated in his imperfect and unstable body by a perfect power - but, unlike this man, nothing can not be perceived for there is nothing to perceive - God does not care to perceive it because what God perceives becomes to be, and that is the only way a thing comes to be. He thought it, therefore it is.

The planet Mars is very much nothing except that God has made it perceivable. He changed it from nothing into something. He choose to notice it, catalogue it, re-member it, create it. Existence is in God only. Otherwise it is meaningless change. But change is too good a word, for in order to change one must change into something from something. Nothing cannot change. It can contain no possibilities -- all possibility must remain in God.

A man without God would be impossible because he could only be, at best, relative permanence. But he can't be relative because in order to be relative one must be relative to something that exists. Only God and what he chooses can be something - as St. Paul says, "God is the All in All". Everything exists by God or it doesn't exist at all -- in any way.

God does not like nothing, indeed, there is no nothing to like.

When He chooses to notice something into existence He never surrenders it back to non-existence. He hates non-existence. Indeed, the theologian, Thomas Aquinas, tells us that it is better to go to Hell than to blink out into nothing [I'm pretty sure he said that].

Existence, no matter how mean, is better than nothing, God hates nothing, and he wants you to hate it too. The devil is made into a type or nothingness, and yet even this obstinate form of free-will He will never let return to nothing. God cannot let him return to nothing because there is no nothing to return to, and, since God remembers thinking it into existence, He cannot forget it without losing part of his perfect mind (impossible, because it's Perfect!). He will keep him forever in constant mutilations. He will keep him in a mutilation zoo forever as a type of nothing. A sign over the bars in front of the cage will say, "Evil, a very good and nourishing bad example made in order to forever remind the children of how not to be." And underneath that, another sign added by some curator to further spark the curiosity of the visitors. "It is interesting to note at this point that for all the time that this great evil persecuted the world, few ever noticed that the word "evil" is the word "live" spelled backwards and the name "devil" is "lived" spelled backward and that the word "Satan" is nature spelled backwards in the Latin language" [Tell me God didn't name the devil!].

Are we beginning to understand the Authority of Peter? He got it from the word of God. Here is what God said, "Your name is foundation (which word literally means "Peter") ,and whatever law you make in heaven shall be a law on earth and whatever law you make on earth shall be a law in heaven and the gates of Hell shall never contradict you". That's what Jesus said to Peter in Matthew 16, 13 and following. That's the word of God.

With those words He created the only true Church of God, and with words did he create the whole universe. Let's read what God says in the first sentence of the Bible in the oldest manuscript ever found so far, the Septuagint, which was written about 270 BC, and, Greek, being a more recently, and consistently used language than the Hebrew, can be understood better than the much older Hebrew which even the Hebrews themselves went for many generations at a time without speaking, and which bible in that language (Hebrew) was lost for more than 200 years and needed to be reconstituted from the Greek Septuagint and memories past down from father to son in about 100 AD. The Biblical idiom is, for our use here, very meaningful for us because it is preserved more surely in the Greek, and the New Testament is also originally in Greek.

That word we see in English as "create", in the beginning of the book of Genesis, chapter one verse one, refers to creation by words. The word in the original Greek is Poetes, which means literally to "create with words". It is the word we derive our word "poetry" from and the Greek word for poet is Poetes, one who creates with words -- one who practices poiesis.

So what is said in the first sentence of that most holy book is, "In the beginning God composed words and so the world was". Imagine what creative words He spoke. He designated a meaning, and that is the real reality behind any thing that is. In the beginning God spoke creatively, like a poet -- only better.

How did God create Mars? He picked the best moment out of swirling nothingness that would suit His purposes and said, "that's Mars". If we have trouble believing it, we need only look at the rest of Genesis Chapter one. And God said let there be light...."And God said, Let there be a firmanent placed so as to separate the waters above from those below... and God said ... etc., etc"

But for final and absolute confirmation of this idea that God created by making note in word of that-which-otherwise-would-be-nothing, we have only to turn to the beginning of the book of John, which says, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him [the word]: and there was nothing made any other way." I told you I would explain it: God said,"That's Mars", and so Mars was created for the first time anywhere! But, in the beginning was the word!

A Perfect living word capable of making even nothing perfectly meaningful -- only God can do it, and He made us so that we can do it a little bit too. Who can deny it? How many people do you know who think that nothing exists? Not even one I'll wager, but, also, almost all of us know ,somehow, that we have free will, creative power, and that we have a self-different from all others. How could any of these things be true unless there is an eternal self existent God making such invisible and immaterial knowledge universal? If nothing doesn't exist there must be such a God: This, precisely, is our proof of God

But there is so much more to question about God. Why did He make the in-between place and us, why? What more does Perfection need than itself if it is truly perfect, and how can a Perfect thing create an imperfect thing? Don't you want to know? Is it perfection if it causes things to happen that are not perfect? Remember, nothing never stops changing back to nothing until God stops it. Nothing cannot in any way exist unless it is fixed by God on the Perfect Bulletin Board of His Perfect Mind.

Consummate is an interesting word, it means to eat and also to make perfect. We eat dead things and make living cells out of what was once dead.

We do a deer a great favor when we kill it and feed it to our children, thus turning its substance into the form of rational people, so to speak. It does not seem to remain an unconscious animal. But a little boy is not a deer even if he is made of the same elements. It is our form alone that makes us what we are. Nothing of the deer changes the boy - the deer is just fuel for our fire. We are not what we eat.

Let's take a look at God there in space along with his created universe: We can't see "nothing" because it does not exist until God chooses to notice it thus calling it into a kind of accurate but poetical existence which becomes, for us, a manageable type of nothingness (not really nothing but a real thing which resembles what nothing would be like if it could exist), for we are not strong enough to deal with absolute nothingness: Perhaps we would fall victim to a fatal vanity. Just by choosing to catalogue it, God gives it real existence on the bulletin board of His Perfect Mind. If it isn't noted there, it isn't, and that's the truth. The decay process of nothing is so fast and continuous that we wouldn't at all be able to see where it even might be if there was anything to see, which there isn't, but more about this later.

What a view is God. As we look we hope "to catch Him at a meal" -- not that we could catch Him by surprise, but He will let us seem to, because He made us to be able to fully "learn by doing, working out our own salvation by fear and trembling". He approves of this manner of direct learning. That is why he created the universe a vast field of Tinker Toys and Erector Sets all lying about in the free toy fair waiting for us to come and learn how to be with our free-will power given in the hope that it would be used, for St. James tells us that "Faith without works is dead". We must use our reason, for how can we do anything without it? We must try within reason, that is how we perfect our fellow seekers and ourselves.

Whatever God "eats" is utterly changed into Himself, consummated. In a like manner, we are put here to consume our environment, making it more agreeable to human life. By doing this we learn to understand and appreciate God.

God is like a farmer. The farmer is in the center of his farm. He is utterly different than anything else on his farm. When he eats an egg, he does not in any way change a little into an egg. The form of the egg is lost totally except that it is remembered in the farmers mind. If the memory of the egg were logged in God's mind, the memory of the egg would be more perfect than the egg, because the egg is always suffering corruption, but in God's perfect mind, all that is fixed there is fixed forever. Since all live in God' as Jesus tells us is a fact, is it possible that the Divine conceptual egg in the mind of God is less alive than the one that is eaten? No. The egg is turned into a thing which lives forever, there is no constantly changing pseudo "egg" any longer, but God remembers what he eats, He had to know all about it before He consummated it into himself, giving it the foundation to exist. So the egg is more alive than ever. But the perfect memory of the "imperfect" egg lives forever in the living mind of the living God of whom Jesus says, "All live in him" (Luke20: 38). Once God perceives, He never forgets - ever. Even Satan will be kept existing forever. The egg, even though being eaten, totally remains, better than ever, in the notice of God. God can have His cake and eat it too. The farmer is like God, and the farm is like the creation out of nothing in which we live.

The farm can only exist because the farmer fences it and fights back the wilderness. The wilderness is created to be a type of nothing, so we can learn somewhat what it was like for God to create out of nothing, and so that all humans might learn how to avoid accidentally resembling nothing. Some things he raises he will never eat, he feeds the animals with them, or perhaps he finds them pleasing, like the flower garden. He guards it. It is like clothing to him, or a house - not living but nevertheless, well ordered.

I said God looks sort of like that farmer, but it is not the same. God does not need anything outside of himself because He is a perfectly self-contained community, father, son, Holy Ghost - these three are one. God is already a community. A perfect thing can never depend on an imperfect thing for its existence: Otherwise how could it be perfect? If God is the farmer, the difference is that the whole farm is a flower garden.

Why did He make it? Only because of this: He Is aesthetically pleased to do it. He doesn't need it; He just likes it with a perfect aesthetical sense. That is also why He made humans.

Now let's examine God's aesthetical preference in order to find out why He likes it. First let's see God sitting down for a bowl of oatmeal mush from His farm. He is a very rich farmer and He doesn't need to eat, but it reminds Him of something pleasant in his past, and so He is aesthetically pleased to eat it every now and then. He ordinarily feeds it to the horses. This very clever farmer has food we know not of - let's say He has a special green house on His roof that, by scientific wonderment, produces perfect food. Since the food is perfectly and absolutely under His perfect and absolute control, it is absolutely perfect food. This food is God, because once chosen by perfection it can have no other existence than to unite with God. Whatever God wills has already happened - nothing else is possible any longer. This food is like the Catholic Eucharist, it looks and tastes like bread and wine, but the word of God has made it clear that it was designated by Perfection before the world was made to be the Divine Flesh and Blood of God's Royal Children, and so it is, right now and forever, the blood of God.

Remember when Jesus said, "eat my body and drink my blood"? Once God said that, because Gods Word is a promise that cannot be broken, the wine and the bread can have no other existence than to be God's flesh and blood, and, since God is never ignorant of the beginnings and ends of all things, we can say that the wine and the bread always were His blood and his skin, even before forever!

The other farm is not perfect; it is like oatmeal. He keeps it because it tickles His fancy.

Don't you think God has fancies? He has hobbies - things He likes to do. He has probably gone for a billion years without eating oatmeal several times, now He will eat a bowl. What a lucky bowl of oatmeal. It will be utterly changed into God and the perception of it - as it was in its most perfect moment, will be kept alive in the perfect re-rememberer of God the Resurrector. But more accurately, since it is impossible that there was ever a time when god did not know when, where, and if, He was going to eat that bowl of oatmeal; therefore, it never was oatmeal unless there is such a thing as Devine and perfect Oatmeal.

If God doesn't have an aesthetical preference (a love of things without any consideration for their utilitarian value), then there could be no world, but just the great farmer and his green house, which is several zillion times greater than the farm.

God makes us to exist in a life and death situation with personal power to begin with, and the power to develop more power as we go on, and, furthermore, He made it impossible for us to learn to get power - real power - unless we learn by personal involvement. "Faith without works is dead." "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." And He did it because He likes things that way best! Doesn't that tell us a lot about the real personality of God? Look at the world. It's full of life and death realities. There are snakes and horrible diseases. Even in the Garden of Eden there was a fatal snake at its center, and right under it, a most beautiful and tasty fruit tree that was also the most deadly poisonousness that ever will exist. God is a reality fancier, who can deny it? If we are ever let into the gates of paradise, we shall be able to hold our heads up, for we really earned our own position there - not by social merit, but in our own personal experience, for painful failure was a real possibility for us at any time on the road to perfection, and in the world to come, we will be accepted as mature people with no childish expectations.

We will have the dignity that only reality that is improved upon by God can confer. We will not have to say, "I dreamed I made a sacrifice for the children". It is pleasing to God, aesthetically, that we should arrive in heaven with real dignity. I am saying that this pleases God most. He loves a life and death situation with real stakes and something even more embarrassing than failure for those who totally disregard the Reality Principle, which is, obedience to perfection (perfect action equals one doing everything possible to avoid death). When we are strong enough, we develop perfect obedience to God who made everything to be the way it is. That's why St. Paul says, "Fear and trembling". However, that obedience will in no way infringe on our unlimited freedom, for that is what the sons and daughters of God are: Unlimited freedom.

If God eats the oatmeal it is consummated. It enters into the perfect community. It has been perfectly initiated.

Evidently, heaven will be full of people who respect the reality principle, which simply means to fear God [fear is just another word for "respect"]. Silly is the word we use for people who do not respect the reality principle.

Do you think there will be any silly people in heaven? No, because the reality principle is so strong in God's creation - and because He is so strongly inclined to cause us to learn how to use power responsibly - that, if there were one silly person in heaven it would not be heaven any longer. Suppose there were no silly people in your community? See? It would be much closer to heaven wouldn't it? That is why we have purgatory, a place where persons can gently, but thoroughly, learn how silly, silly can be.

Why has He spent so much to teach us how to use power? -- Because some day He is going to deliver an awesome amount of it into our hands. It's a big universe out there, and it is empty as empty can be. He is aesthetically pleased to honor His sons and daughters by allowing them to help him organize and populate it. This is not the sort of inheritance that a silly person should have.

Everyone in heaven is Catholic. There are no non-Catholics in heaven. By the time a person gets to heaven, he is a Catholic. That is the truth, ergo, if you want to get to heaven, you must fear (respect) God as much as a completed Catholic does.

How is it possible that there is not a God? Tell me and I will believe you. The modern astrophysicists and astronomers tell us they can't find the beginning or the end of the universe. They can't find out what started it all, and they don't even have a guessing theory to explain it. Who or what started the thing that started the thing that started it? Knowing that (that none of them know who or what caused the universe), isn't it a little silly not to seek to find out if there is a God or not? If there is no God, then why waste your time being extra special good? Indeed, St. Paul tells us that if there is no God we should "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" (Cor.16: 32). But we don't see how there could not be one. This, because of what we know of the universe, and what reason reveals to us about the nature of infinity (there is no end whatsoever), we know for sure that if nothing doesn't exist, there must be a God. In a field of an infinitude of possibilities, there must exist the possibility of God. In a field of infinite possibilities, there must exist the possibility of no possibilities (and this precisely is the accurate definition of God).

We might hope there is no God, but it is illogical to think so. If you heard on the radio that some fiend put a deadly snake under every 50th bed in your town, would you go to bed without checking that possibility first? No, it would be silly not to check first. Yet, correct me if I am wrong, there is at least one in fifty chances that there is a God, even in the imaginations of the most confirmed agnostics, and if there is one - He is a million times more dangerous than any snake. Jesus says. "Fear not those who can only kill the body but otherwise cannot harm you, fear instead He who can throw both body and soul into everlasting hell." (Matt. 10:28). But there is a way you don't have to fear being sent to hell forever - go get baptized in the name of the Perfect Community, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Any Christian can do it for you. This way you can avoid Hell forever for sure - why take the slightest chance?

If we are sane, before we go on our way, we will find out, once and for all, if there is a God or not! If we are silly - I mean really silly, we will put it out of our minds by vain diversions in the world, and hope that, somehow, there really is not such a stress on using our free will to really try to get to really know God, and accept personal responsibility for the well-being and lives of our fellow seekers of Perfection, as there most strongly appears to be.

But what a mistake the world is making! Consider abortion murders, and that the contraceptive pill and the I.U.D. do not very often prevent pregnancy, but kill the baby within, denying baptism - denying a soul entry into the flesh and blood family of God which is the only place our curiosity is ever totally satisfied.

Remember the Greek word faith [pisteos] means not that you blindly accept a precept, but that you faithfully persevere in discovering the truth, making it real in your own experiences. A faithful person is a tenacious person. He keeps on with keeping on. He resists discouragement. He keeps asking for help. He never says die. He keeps looking for eternal life for himself and his loved ones. So God says, "Now there is someone who really believes in reality, and has not let wishful thinking become his false God (true idolatry). I think - since he does not worship vain and false gods - I will keep him close to me forever and ever. I love people who hate death. Yes! Yes, I love people who hate nothing! I love people who are easily bored, I love people who hate mindless conformity! I will make them into my real flesh and blood children by a baptism which in reality is a real re-birth as an embryonic god. I myself will be with them even in the womb".

How can I believe in God when He does not do many miracles? God loves the reality principle so much that He does not want to supersede the rules of reality. Well, if we were rewarded every time we did a wrong thing we would be very stupid by the time we got to heaven. We would think nothing of jumping off buildings or eating poison or smoking opium as a pass time.

Yet God does abridge the rules of reality when He makes a miracle, but He only does it in order to make up for cheatings on the other side. He quickly catches us up to the place the human race would have been had there not been unfair competition in our race to get real power. That's why there are not so many miracles - yet there are enough to keep our hope alive and hope is worth about one billion dollars per ounce these days. Would you like some? Why not try finding out it there really is a God or not? Seek the Truth according to the reality principle and you will find God, and you will discover the source of all Hope and your heart will sing again.

But why does God like things made this way? To know that, we would need to know an awful lot about the basic personality of God - but we already do since He revealed Himself in Jesus. Therefore, let us carry on with trying to try to understand.

I understand God the Father is a spirit. He does not exist with a physical body - a nervous system, etc., but He must have a perfect understanding of these things for He created them - just like they are. Can he feel pain? How can He know it? What does He know of our sufferings that he should make us so that we suffer so?

But you, you also feel pain most perfectly without your nerve endings. The greater pain I speak of is the guilt, which is an aspect of the highest form of human love.

If I allow my children to play too close to the freeway, I feel a great pain. Why? My nerve endings stop at the ends of my fingertips, and yet I feel a great agony. If my children were run over by a steamroller how could I feel their pain? I would feel bone-crushing guilt because I have let down my extended body. Guilt is very painful. Guilt is the spiritual pain I feel when I have let down a loved one who is far beyond the physical pain sensors of my personal body, and it is the most agonizing of all pain possible.

I never feel guilt for any other reason - neither does anyone else. This guilt is a very high form of love indeed - the best thing that ever happened to the human race. Without it we could not exist as a species. Who can deny the agony of guilt? When I am this guilty it is only because I think I have let down others. I might very well be wrong, but it was nice of me to feel that way for the sake of others. Therefore it is a spiritual pain.

Guilt is the basic feeling that binds our race together. Guilt, another word for love. How wonderful it is to see a man feeling guilty in this respect. Give yourself to that feeling; trust in it - it is your sixth sense. A man in guilt is in pain for the sake of others. It is as if he were covered with a layer of gold. Can you imagine how much guilt Eve and Adam felt on leaving paradise with all their future children's unhappiness upon their heads?

Guilt alone tells us that we need to do penance, that most acceptable and loved offering that God accepts and rewards above all others.

"Wisdom preserved Adam, that was first formed by God the father of the earth, when he was created alone, and Wisdom brought him out of his sin by penance and gave him power to govern all things." (Wisdom 10:l & 2): And so Adam did! He governed the whole world for almost 1000 years!

All power comes to man through penance. Penance was the first thing Adam did on coming out of Eden. Penance is the first and most important thing to do in this world of sorrow. We have ignored the Reality Principle. We disobeyed Perfection. We thought we could survive without regard for the source of all power. Therefore we must learn directly, through our trials and errors, for we did not believe Authority. 0h Lord, give me another chance to take your advice for the consequences of my disobedience are indeed horrible, we kill ourselves and we act like beasts, yes, all of us, God save the children. Who can deny we prefer to live by man-made rules and regulations [laws] rather than with a clear and trusting heart?

Non-physical pain is the worst, as it should be, for everything is for the children. Animals, which care for their species the most successfully, eat the animals that care less for their young . Thus rats are food for the pig, and everything is food for man who would care for his young the very best if he would use his free will power as directed by God. But, because of abortion man has become more heartless than a reptile. Only sick mammals kill their young, or hungry reptiles, but we do it purely for convenience. The end of the world is coming (this system of things) - even if there were no God, some humans are now too non-mammalian to survive.

But look at a beehive. Each bee is stupid. It has no brain to speak of, just a tiny knot of nerves in its head. If it is a brain, however, it is also the smallest in the insect world. It is just a toy compared to a turtle. And when a turtle dies few children cry, but a dog! It seems to laugh and cry before it dies. Even adults have been known to lose control when an animal such as this dies. But let us go the back to the bee. There it is. It builds houses for its young and stores food and gives its' life for it's children. When one bee finds food it informs the others as to where they will find it (a type of communication). They will die to protect the queen. Yet each bee is stupid compared to a dog. How can creatures with such simple bodies do so well - much better than a dog pack?

Consider your own body. It is made up of one-celled animals - little single cell slugs much more primitive than a bee which is a multi-celled marvel compared to any cell in our body. Each cell in your body's community of slugs-like cells is far stupider than a bee - yet how much more are we than a bee? Your cells, being glued together, pass on environmental information to one another, so that the whole human body moves together as one organization instead of billions. Yet the bees are like cells in a body that is not glued together by anything material. If you lose a few thousand cells it doesn't really matter. Nor does it matter if the hive loses a few thousand bees; after all, they are just cells for the hive that are not glued together by chemicals, but instead communicate to one another by odors, tastes, and complex signs.

Each bee is very primitive - but look at the hive: it operates on a higher level than a cat perhaps.

But you can't really see the hive self can you? It is invisible, like God, except to eyes of logic. It is really the hive self we are admiring, not the bees. The more communication that exists between member-units of each animals group, the higher is the survival ability of that species: The highest insect, the bee, ant, or termite, the highest rodent, a beaver, the highest ape, a Chimpanzee, the highest monkey, a baboon.

But these highest species are the most vulnerable when separated from their respective groups. What is more helpless than a lone ant or a lost bee? What power to survive is there for a beaver separated? How can a chimpanzee survive without his group? A wolf or a bear would do all right, and a crocodile doesn't need anybody very much.

And so, a man alone is in the greatest peril, like a human brain trying to live in the Atlantic Ocean competing with jellyfish. Men need other members of their species more than any other species. Isn't that why we feel so much guilt? Isn't this guilt the invisible glue that holds mankind together? Aren't there feelings of guilt strong enough to kill a man? We are a community. We are made in the image of God. God is a perfect community. The image of God is a community. If we all had one desire and were all tied to one physical body, we would all look in one direction at one thing at the same time and so lose an advantage. To be perfect, we need to look in all directions at all times. Only a community of individuals can do it. Isn't that why there are three distinct executive individual persons in the one and only God? Yet these individuals must love their society as one. In a community, one sleeps while the other remains awake and on guard so that the sleeping member is not in danger. When one is studying germs, at the same time another is studying meteor bombardments, and another is repairing the wall and another is working on the dam. Another produces food and another hauls away the trash. As St. Paul puts it. "Can the eye say to the hand, I hate you?" Each member of the physical and the extended body depend on one another for the life. The community of God is a community of Divine individuals -- each one with his whole attention on the survival of the whole. Not an ant colony -- but each one doing his own thing, each one willing to die for the whole thing in order to protect and perpetuate the right and the freedom and the power for each individual to continue to do her or his own thing in freedom forever, and this is much better than an ant colony, or the cells that make up your body.

But if an ant colony were to have a rebel amongst its membership, it would be a real cancer to the ant community. A cancer cell is a protest-ant against the colony body. It no longer puts the whole before its' Self, and its' Self becomes all of its concern. It lies to the rest of the body, and so the whole body dies. Cancer is a very serious communicational breakdown. The whole community dies. Therefore communication and under-standing with God are essential to survival. We must learn to communicate with God, and we cannot communicate with what we do not understand. We are put here to learn to understand God, to know God the only way we are created to know.

So then, say that mankind has an extended self - like the bees do. What a great-extended self that self would be indeed! A man is more than a bee. What if the extended self of the bees became as intelligent as a man? Do you think that it might look down on the bees and say, "It would be very symmetrical if I could somehow give these bees the gift of reason. If only I could breathe a rational soul into them so they would see and perceive, like we do in the Synthesis Self of the bees. Then they would learn, first hand, that they should rule themselves with love and liberty, letting each individual work out his or her own salvation with personal care and responsibility in freedom.

The synthesis self would explain things this way: "Now, I do not need these bees to be rational - I am fine by myself, but it would please me because of the symmetry of it. Such a happening would aesthetically please me. Imagine it! Each unit member of my new material body a reasonable and living free will member doing his own thing which he learned his own way (in obedience with reason) with love forever, each becoming a new and complete member of the community or family that I am."

Of course there is no Synthesis Self of the bees although there certainly is something like a synthesis computer that makes the hive-self such a marvel. But in God you can bet that every part and member is absolutely rational. To be absolutely rational would be to perfectly understand the secret of the universe (which is that rational humility demands obedience to perfection) - but can't we steal a glimpse of it in the words of Jesus Christ who came to explain it all to us? Suppose that there was a Synthesis Self for mankind? How would it break the good news of this gospel to the Bee like humans? Would It not say something like this after taking the form of one of the bees so as to be listened to: {Christ's prayer for his disciples. St. John: Chapter 17}

1. These things Jesus spoke, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said: Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son that thy Son may glorify thee.

2. As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he may give eternal life to all whom thou hast given him.

3. Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee. The only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.

4. I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.

5. And now glorify thou me, 0 Father, with thyself, with the glory which I had, before the world was with thee.

6. I have manifested thy name to the men whom thou hast given me out of the world. Thine they were, and to me thou gavest them; and they have kept thy word.

7. Now they have known, that all things which thou hast given me, are from thee.

8. Because the words which thou gavest me, I have given to them; and they have received them, and have known in very deed that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.

9. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me; because they are thine.

10. And all my things are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.

11. And now I am not in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to thee. Ho1y Father, keep them in thy name whom thou hast given me; that they may be one, as we also are one.

12. While I was with them, I kept them in my name. "Those whom thou gavest me I have kept and none of them is lost. But the son of perdition, that the scripture may be fulfilled.

13. And now I come to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy filled in themselves.

14. I have given them thy word, and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world; as I also am not of the world.

15. I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil.

16. They are not of the world, as I am not of the world.

17. Sanctify them in truth. Thy word is truth.

18. As thou hast sent me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.

19. And for them do I sanctify myself that they also maybe sanctified in truth.

20. And not for them only do I pray, but for them also who through their word shall believe in me.

21. That they all may be one as thou Father, in me, and I in thee; that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

22. And the glory, which thou hast given me, I have given to them; that they may be one, as we also are one:

23. I in them, and thou in me; that they may be made perfect in one: and the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as thou hast also loved me.

24. Father, I will that where I am, they also whom thou hast given me may be with me; that they may see my glory which thou hast given me, because thou hast loved me before the creation of the world.

25. Just Father, the world hath not known thee; but I have known thee: and these have known that thou hast sent me.

26. And I have made known thy name to them, and will make it known; that the love wherewith thou hast loved me, may be in them, and I in them.

But there are many other reasons for believing in God - if this is not enough for you, seek them and, I promise, you shall find them. I only ask that you seek in humility with regard to your fellow man and the Reality Principle. If nothing doesn't exist then God must exist. If nothing does exist then it is certainly possible that God doesn't exist at all. Its very difficult to prove that nothing exists, perhaps it is time someone gave it a good try. But, seriously, clearly, and with no possibility of contradiction, it is completely impossible for nothing to exist.

But if you prefer not to believe in Total Existence (God), then consider that you have made a contract with death, for you have denied the possibility of the community of mankind ever being able to gain enough power to resist death completely. "It never ever happened before and it won't ever happen to the human race," an atheist would say -- even though the universe goes on and on, and time also, forever, and contains an infinitude of possibilities, he prefers to not believe in the inevitable possibility of Perfection -- that God must needs occur before the beginning of time, for how else could time have started? He superstitiously rejects the possibility of success. He capitulates to his master, death. It could not be that in an infinity of possibilities there never has yet occurred the perfect intelligence (God). He believes in nothing; he has rejected infinity. He has even rejected the evolutionary concept of time eventually causing perfection. At least, one would think, he would try to be a member of the first race in the universe to reach Godhood by science -- but he won't. If he had never had that never-say-die attitude he would have discovered that there already is a God.

The only way our atheist would ever gain the power to conquer death is by becoming a perfect citizen and then sacrificing himself in some way to build the well ordered society of well ordered people which would be an absolutely necessary prerequisite to developing the high level of understanding required to conquer death and accident. No man could ever fly to the moon without a city of law-abiding people behind him. No one man is capable of performing the billions of separate things needed to accomplish such a feat. We need one another desperately.

The cells in your body are a community of beasties, they have babies, and they carry out the dead from the body. There are cells that destroy other cells that will not conform to the life giving and maintenance needs of your body. Of course if our city-community-body had better "executioner cells" our bodies might be rid of the cause of cancer and aging and death. What is it that kills communities so that no society can exist long enough to find out the science of eternal life, but lawless or selfish or apathetic citizens?

Since your body - like a community - must produce new members (baby cells) in order to survive, then we must have cells or members that do not interfere with the reproduction of our bodies (no birth control for that small body). We must have cells that do not steal from other members. If the eye hates the hand how long will we live? Reason informs us that we must keep the community healthy at all times if we are going to escape destruction and death. So, if you ever hope to escape death - even if you do not believe in a God--then you must sacrifice your selfish life in order to advance your community so that it will be well ordered enough to build you and your children an eternal life pill. A man alone cannot succeed - all of us are too weak -- all of us who are sane know it. No one man, or small group, could have gone to the moon - we need each other. We would need each other even more to build the Eternal Life Pill.

When we do something together as unifiers our efficiency will be geometrically increased. Two people can do more than twice as much work as one, and four as much as eight, and there is a geometrical progression of efficiency gained through the intelligent unification of organizational efforts directed towards goals requiring human effort that move closer and closer to perfection. So our sole purpose in life should be to unify ourselves in truth.

The prefix "com" means, "come together" and unity means Oneness, so that community means come together, be one. A real community can exist only if the members have come together and are one, or they are dedicated to that realization. The only way people can get together is through communication so that two people become of one mind reflecting the truth that there is but one reality which is not in opposition to itself. The fundamental aspect of sanity is that we see that there are not two or more realities, as perfection can be but one, so there can be only one God. Consider further that real communication also means love, because if two people became as one self they must both love each other as self because they understand that they have a self common to the survival of both separate and unique selfs. Communication makes all men lovers. Only this perfect identification of the individual within the community will insure the survival of the community that protects and empowers those who wish to unify, but it refuses to attempt to unify with separation. "Let the dead bury their dead." In other words, let those who will not choose unity freely choose to separate. Separation = death. Unity = life. The wages of sin are death. If you wish to keep yourself alive you must keep the world alive. If you wish to succeed in the best and most lasting way, you must love your community as you love yourself.

So, if you are going to try to survive forever, you are going to have it to love your neighbor as yourself, be a model citizen. Don't steal, don't lie, don't murder, don't covet your neighbor's wife, and don't give your energies to some idol (a thing which doesn't really exist but is nothing), don't waste your life, be always willing to sacrifice yourself for the good of mankind. You must be as moral (if you ever in some way intend to be like God yourself) as if there already was a God - there is no other way to make a society strong enough to build for you your eternal life pill, and the necessary super-computers so that you can be your own God.

In order to be perfect, you must first try to be perfect. If you try you will find that there already is a God. The first thing you will discover is that the moral laws of the Catholic church are already perfect - so perfect that only something already perfect could have made them.

Do you think the sexual laws of Church are too hard? Look at the horror of abortion. See where our lack of reason has led us? We murder our own children. Only sick or starving animals eat their own young, but we do it only for convenience, for we make medicines out of aborted babies and inject these into the bodies of wealthy people, so they will not have to die just yet. Whether you devour a baby with a spoon or a syringe, it is cannibalism of the most horrible sort. The "Pill" and the I.U.D. do not always prevent pregnancy, but often kill the very young baby within. In these ways we kill more human babies than we allow to be born. Surely, as never before in the history of the world, we murder our own fellow humans in greater numbers than ever before - more people have been killed by abortion than all the holocausts and wars in all of human history.

We don't even allow them to be born before we kill them; in fact we consider it a kindness to murder them while they are yet in their most young and helpless state. Even reptiles do not destroy such a large portion of their young. Etymologically, the word "abortion" means "very bad omen portending destruction". It is the "abomination of desolation" that God tells us will mark the destruction of the world.

Look at what the words "abomination of desolation" mean. It means, " A bad omen, portending a massive destruction which will come to be".

We should hurry, we don't have much time. Do yourself a great favor; find out once and for all whether or not there is a God, and you are very close to knowing. Don't let wishful thinking become your false God causing a fatal delay in your race for power in life.

The end is going to be horrible for those who found seeking freedom, power, and life, boring.

But we will not be bored, for we have a great desire to prove the existence of God. We seek proofs, and it is always better to base our proofs on the rock solid foundation of an already solidly established and confirmed truth: And that truth is that if nothing doesn't exist, there must be, in that non-ending infinitude that must therefore exist, a God, who himself created the existing infinitude.

The whole world was created for seekers. It has no other reason to exist. When this world becomes so old and worn out that it no longer can assist seeking, then its sole purpose for existing is gone and it is ready for the fire.

However, we seekers should not fear its demise, the end will not harm us for whom it operated, for we are the fire which will destroy the world, i.e., this present system of things.

But the end of all these wonderful figures of imperfection, and even nothingness, have a beautiful and fascinating end which many of us have no fear of at all, the reason for which we shall see in the next chapter.

Catholics tend towards preaching, whether by talk or example, or by helping those to whom these gifts are given: This is not to say that those who were given these gifts are in any way superior - for the gifts of preaching, if they are truly graces or gifts, are from God, and if from God they are not merited at all! This is the teaching of the Church, for God is not a respecter of persons, but we all enjoy equality as full members in the family of God, Our Father, by His loving choice alone. This is not to say we should not give place to the gift that has been given, but we should respect the office of our fellow Christians so they can do their work for us; for, after all, these gifts are God-given, and Scripture tells us that"...God doth not give the Holy Spirit by measure," (John 3:34). We cannot say, this or that person has only a portion of the gift, but so and so has 99.9 percent. Therefore, every person in the family of God has the full measure of talents from God, even though most of them are invisible to most. But if we whose gift is preaching preach what do we preach? We preach the gospel - we preach the Good News ["gosspel" literally means "good news"] - we have a lot of good news to choose from (for example, gifts of the Holy Spirit) but today let us begin by talking about the best of all the gifts - the best of the Good News: All persons who are willing to seek the meaning of what they are hearing from our graces and gifts as preachers, are invited to become full members of the Family of God What does this mean? How can such a thing be? If we are going to be able to impart the most important part of the Good News, we are going to have to understand it very well, for it is also the most important gift that we ourselves have been given: And a gift that is not fully appreciated offends the Giver [God] if the gift was conceived as absolutely perfect and bought at a great price. Let us examine the gift of Familyhood in the Family of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is an important teaching, and we will be on safe ground if we let Holy Scripture speak for us: In Ephesians 1:4,5 St. Paul teaches us that God, "chose us in Him, before the world was made, to be holy and unspotted in His sight in love: who hath predestinated us into the adoption of children through Jesus Christ". What does it mean that God "chose us" before the world was made? Just this: God always knew - even before he universe was made - even from before all time - even from before eternity - that you would be born and baptized, and therefore become a member of His very own Divine Family.

It does not matter if you studied Religion all your life and then, after careful reflection, asked to be Baptized an adopted son of God, for you could not have done it unless God had chosen you first. Therefore, the chosen must have existed, in some ineffable sense, in the living mind of God from all eternity, for who would say that God, who is absolutely All Knowing, ever existed for a moment that He did not know exactly when you would be born or if or if not you would choose to be baptized. We know this is the case for Scripture (which cannot be in error) tells us, through St. Paul, that God "foreknew" us perfectly and so predestined us to be His children (Romans 8:29). And this is a reasonable view, for it can only be that the parent chooses the child, the child can not choose the parent (since it does exist yet).

Therefore how can any of us adopted children of God take personal credit for becoming the children of God? We can't anymore than we can take credit for being the children of our earthly parents. In fact, we who studied hard to become baptized sons and daughters of God, differ in no way from the child who was baptized at birth before the age of reason and choice. It is puzzling in the face of all that is written above, that those Christians who call themselves "Baptists" refuse to consider infant baptism as true baptism, for whether or not we are accepted as sons and daughters of God is absolutely predestined by the Father of the reborn. "Well, if God predestines even that, how is it that humans have much choice at all", someone might ask? God, being All Knowing, can't help but to know everything. He knows who is going to purgatory and who is not, even from before forever; however, as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, we learn best when learning by doing. For this kind of learning we need free will. We need to learn to take responsibilityfor our own decisions. How could we do that unless God cleared the board of all knowledge of what individuals were going to exactly do with their free will choices? How could a person choose to marry a certain kind of mate unless the fact that that person was going to choose a highly adventurous course of life style fell under the protection of God who guards the right to privacy? If all these future personal events were fore known by us, we would never learn to choose on our own: We would of course, avoid all agony. And why else did God give us free will except to learn by doing?

But St. Paul, I think makes it quite clear in Philippians 2:12-13, "Wherefore, my dearly beloved, with fear and trembling work out your own salvation. For it is God who worketh in you [to assist all humans] both to will and to accomplish, according to good will."

Free will are just other words for "self", or "consciousness", for with out choice these two could not exist.

God loves equality. Indeed, it is written by James in James- 3:4 that sin is iniquity (iniquity is just the old English word for inequality). And what can the skills of inequality serve but pride? Indeed, what was the sin of Adam and Eve when they filled themselves with the judgment tree, but the sin of inequality? For it says in Ecclus.10: 14-15, "Pride is the beginning of all sin (all inequality)", and therefore is original sin - the very one we are all suffering from. But, 1st John 5:17 makes it all perfectly clear, "all iniquity is sin". But God hates all iniquity and loves equality, as St Paul tells us in Philippians -2:5-6, "For let this mind be in you which is also in Christ Jesus [who is God], Who, being in the form [human image] of God [that is he looked just like us] thought it not robbery to be equal with God...[and neither should any of the baptized]" Let us also have this mind in us by the infinite generosity of our Father, who desires all men to be equal to Himself by accepting the gift of adoption and therefore become equal to God in the sense that all members of the immediate royal family are equally royal. Of course, you do not give a six year old the keys to the royal car, and all members are required by the power of reality to respect and obey the supernatural laws and traditions of the Kingdom. So it is with the Baptized, who are given all the royal freedom they need, when they are ready for it, to learn how to control the tremendous freedom power they are all gifted with - all of them. But what are you reading here? Perhaps it has struck you that the Baptized are only "adopted" sons of God. How can a person only adopted feel like a full member of the royal family? But see, when we think like this, we think in terms of the our temporarily fallen state.

If you found a deformed child on your doorstep, and the social service Agency refused to take it off your hands, and you had to either kill it or raise it with your own children, would you love that child the same as your own? I've asked that question of many people. Some say they probably wouldn't be able to, but they wished they could: Most say they would: But God is much better than even the most saintly of us - God is pure love and mercy and equality. He certainly would not discriminate between His begotten son and His adopted son. Does perfect Love have a flaw? God's love and fairness - being perfect and limitless - allows Him easily to love you just as much as He loves Jesus Christ. After all, did He not kill His only son in order to win our love? I think so, for it says in Isa. 53:5-6 about God's begotten son, that "...he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his bruises we are healed. All have like sheep gone astray, everyone hath turned aside unto his own way: And the Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all." And, of course, made Him die instead of the human race. After all, no man has the power to crucify God unless God allows it. He died for us so that we would really believe that He really wanted us to be a full member of His Family.

But some of those who read about this 'equality with God' might still be suspicious of such a very large gift. After all, if someone called you up and said you have just won twenty million dollars if you would just do such and such, wouldn't you check into it first - and thoroughly?

Perhaps we believe every word of the Bible is true, and Jesus says it is in John 10: 34-35, "Jesus answered them (who wanted to kill him because he said he was God): Is it not written in your law (Ps. 81:6) I said you are gods? If they are called 'gods' to whom the word of God was spoken, and the Scripture cannot be broken [can never be the slightest bit wrong]; Do you say of Him whom the Father hath sent into the world: Thou blasphemest, because I said, I am the son of God?"

Perhaps some people will wish to kill you someday if you were to say, "First and foremost I am a legitimate and genuine son of God, and God loves me just as much as He loves Jesus Christ, my king, who is my oldest brother and in whose body I am a member."

However, You would be right and your killer would be wrong. But I anticipate that some of my readers doubt that we are really bona fide sons of God and full members of the Divine Family. This Good News sounds a bit too good to be true; this good news is nothing less than totally mind boggling Good News. No doubt, the shock of hearing it may have temporarily unbalanced some minds. Upon recovery, we hope they will read what St. Paul said to the Galatians where it is all summed up, for Paul had a way of saying these things which tended to soothe and preserve our fragile human brains, being filled as they are with endless computer-like programs of traditionalized and deified inequalities: Paul says, concerning the reborn (those baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the predestinated, who were baptized in some mysterious sense, by God before they were even conceived in the womb) - in Galatians 4:1-7, "Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he differs in no way from a servant, though he be the Lord of all, but is under teachers and governors until that time appointed by his Father. So we also, when we were children, were serving under the law. But when the fullness of time was come, God sent His son, made of a woman under the law: That He might redeem them who were under the law: that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of His Son into your hearts crying: Abba, Father (Abba is Aramaic for "Daddy"). Therefore, now he is not a servant, but a son. And if a son, an heir also through God." Is there anyone in the world who really believes these words? Perhaps you do? Perhaps you are seeking to find out the truth of these words?

But this Good News is hard for most of us to believe, even among most of the baptized, because men tend to see God as they see themselves, stern, hard, judgmental, and loving to be separated and higher than the average, and, even better, to be the absolute highest - the top, the one who controls the will of multitudes. They do not see God as He is, the One among us who wants only a community of love and perfect freedom with the performance of those necessary, highly visible, and potentially powerful high offices, being done in a spirit of perfect humility and fraternal equality, with a bone-deep love of sharing. So it is important for us to go on about how this great gift is actually given, not poetically given, but with absolute generosity in a flaming divine love of perfect sharing. Let us quote Paul further: Rom. 8:14 "For whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For you have not received the spirit of bondage again in fear; but you have received the spirit of adoption of the sons, whereby we cry: "Abba (literally means "daddy" in Aramaic), Father". For the Spirit Himself giveth testimony to our spirit, that we are the sons of God. And if sons, heirs also; heirs indeed of God, and joint heirs with Christ."

But see, if all the above means that we only have the title "sons" in a poetical sense, or an allegorical sense, or only in an honorary sense - and not as an absolute, total, and complete fact - we will see a human limitation, which does not really exist, to God's love and good wishes towards us, and therefore we will lack confidence in our place in Him, for He foreknew us before all eternity, and therefore, since "all live in God" as Jesus tells us, we had a certain shade of mysterious life in Him before we had life on earth in time, for He knew us completely and perfectly before we were conceived, even before time was conceived. So, let us go on proving our point, for many will have a very difficult time believing they have been invited to godhood: But Jesus did say, "be perfect as my Father is Perfect!" If only we could believe just this, all the power and clarity and organizing abilities of Cod would be in the hands of the reborn by virtue of the knowledge of who they really are - for power from God is only received through "confidence", which word literally means "With Faith" or "With Belief", or "with a spirit of never giving up". So let us add more and more to what faith was first given us: That alone was why we were placed here on Earth.

They are sons and daughters of God through Baptism, but they are sleeping gods and goddesses: Awake, all you perfect children of Divinity! Take the world in hand and heal it! Sounds like radical thinking, doesn't it? But the Bible - which book cannot be wrong, for it all, from Genesis to Revelations - is the perfect Word of God. Indeed! It says in the Holy Book in Ecclesiasticus (Old Testament) 39:17 that God calls us - "By a voice, He saith: Hear me, ye divine offspring, and bud forth as the rose protecting a well watered garden!" But, if we do not, in our heart of hearts, believe that we are, in fact, divine offspring, we can't very well do that at all can we? But bear with us a little longer as I try to reveal this richest of all gifts God has given us - endless real power, which we can use for good or evil. But, if we have confidence in God, knowing His generosity and mildness - we will only want to be like Father. But thank God for St. John, who by a completely undeserved gift of the Holy Spirit (he would be the first to admit it) writes beautiful words, words of infinite hope and happiness, which make it plainer yet that God's children we are!

Who can say it better than St. John who, showing us his great gift as a Bishop in the Catholic Church, says, "Behold! What manner of Love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be the sons of God! Therefore the world knoweth not us, because it knew not Him. Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God; and it hath not appeared what we shall be [when we are fully mature]. But we know, that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him because we shall [be able to] see Him as He [really] is" (In other words to see and know the Truth perfectly as God knows it. Does this not only mean that we shall be absolutely one in divinity under the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?). "And everyone that hath this hope in Him is Holy and sanctities himself [whoever is a seeker]." "Whosoever commits sin commits also iniquity, and sin is iniquity"!

And here is a great warning from a loving brother and a fellow child of God. For many baptized (those reborn into the Divine Family), do not, because of a profound lack of self confidence, use their gifts to care for their poorer brothers and sisters in God, but (lacking the self confidence of a fully aware son of God) use their gift to surround themselves with worldly security, while Catholic children go un-educated and uninformed, eating out of the garbage dumps of the world. Their wealth is really only an aspirin which only slightly eases the pain of their great doubt about their Father's intentions. They act just like security vampires, sucking the life blood of their real blood and flesh brothers and sisters in Christ. But they are in reality, sleeping Gods, who even now possess the power to cure the flesh and blood family of God, however, if you will have it, through no fault of their own, but only because they were deceived by a jaded society, they are not fully awake in belief. I say they too are our flesh and blood brothers and sisters in the truest sense of flesh and blood relationships, because we eat the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, who tells us for a fact that His flesh is flesh in truth and His blood is blood in truth: And this Flesh and Blood is the most important Flesh and Blood of all flesh and blood. Beyond argument, the Divine Family, our family, is our most important family.

All the Baptized are given a cross of sin upon their entry into the family of God by that re-birth that is Baptism. But the confusion they suffer by virtue of helping Jesus carry some small part of the sins of humanity, is not sin as we may have been taught to perceive sin. But the best explanation I can give you about this cross of sin comes right out of the most authoritarian and sacred document of the Catholic Church. Here are enlightening words from The Council of Trent, Session 5, paragraph 5: -- a document so profound that it perhaps trumps even the words of a sitting Pope"... this holy synod confesses and is sensible, that in the baptized there remains concupiscence, or an incentive to sin. This concupiscence, which the apostle [St. Paul] some�times calls sin [in the Bible], the holy Synod declares that the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin, as being truly and properly sin in those born again [i.e., the baptized], but [only] because it is of sin, and inclines to sin." What is this Baptism that it so completely removes us from the normal human condition forever, so that even our sins are no longer considered sins so much as mistakes? It can be nothing else but a complete and perfect rebirth into the divine family of God.

Some American Indians desiring a larger family than genetically possible, would cut their arm, ask someone to do the same, then press the bleeding wounds together so that the bloods would mingle - and both would, in a sense, eat each others blood so that thereafter both were in fact, "blood brothers", and the Indian believed it was true: And, thereafter, was willing to give up his very life for his "blood brother" considering him a real member of his immediate family. Is this not also the mind of Jesus Christ who also, loving us, wants us to eat His blood- making it, i.e., divine blood, a real and permanent part of ourself? Yes, it is.

All that is lacking in the sleeping rich Christian, is the ability to see all Christians as blood and flesh relatives - not distant relatives at all - for these Christians have received the substance and grace to save from suffering, starvation, and disease. What withholds them? Only this, they do not have a strong belief in their own godhood - they are sleeping gods. Who will awaken them to the fact that their last name is god, because they are forever in the family of God who is their factual Father?

Let us awaken them with family love instead of hate, for, after all, they are our real brothers and sisters, and this world of inequality is full of powerful sin - who can judge why they have slept in for so long? But we are far better off if we love our kin rather than seem to do as they only seem to have done, for they have not deceived themselves nearly so much as they are deceived and confused by the very society for whose sake they all carry the cross of confusion.

"He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in the darkness even until now. He that loves his brother, abideth in the light, and there is no scandal in him (I John 2:9,10)." " Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. And you know that no murderer hath eternal life [presently] abiding in himself. In this we have known the Charity of God, because He laid down His Life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. He that hath substance of this world and shall shut up his bowels from him; how doth the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word, nor in tongue, but in deed, but in truth!" (1 John 3,15-18). If we allow a person to starve, do we not seem to hate him? And so, let us love all the reborn and those who will soon be reborn. We can bring the Good News to both of thesegroups, for the baptized rich spiritually insecure (perhaps this is their cross, given to them by God to help heal all mankind), and those predestined to be reborn into the Family of God - both wait to hear this first and best of the Good News. It's our duty and good pleasure to follow Christ's directions, and bring the gospel (especially this most important part) to all people in the world: By this the People of God will be completed, and begin to love one another; for to understand the Gift is to be greatly encouraged, for, as Christ told us, it is our confidence [faith] that heals. If by our teaching we give our Family and mankind in general (for we know not who will or will not soon be reborn), confidence, and the unlimited confidence that comes from knowing that God wants to recreate by rebirth [baptism] anyone who will listen to His words with their heart of hearts, as His very own conscious beloved son or daughter - then we are truly free from the sorrows of this evil world and have in hand, from God, the real power we need to begin to convert this world towards the organization of pure peace and joy. It's a simple straight forward message, Let us tell it to all who are predestined by God to hear it, and let us teach it to those baptized who until now have heard it only imperfectly because of the great weight of their wonderful crosses, which for two thousand years have been the sole foundations of the whole world.

After they hear this, they, like us, will hear what Jesus told us all to do, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Good News to every creature: He that believeth shall be saved (Luke 16:16)." And if someone will show them the way to confidence, they will do it, and the believing children of God will be saved, and the world will be changed into a place where the sons and daughters of God will rule in peace and joy in absolutely perfect justice forever.

And all this we can boldly work and hope towards, in perfect confidence, without anxiety, if we but keep these words of St. John, and the meaning behind them, foremost in our heart of hearts, "This is He that came by water and blood, Jesus Christ: Not by water only, but by water and blood! (I John 5:6). That most important of all blood which we drink. Surely it is this very blood, which we all have in common, that is always welcoming us best into the Family of God: For all the Baptized are blood brothers of Christ and our Father, God.

And Christ tells us, "Truthfully, I tell you, as long as you did it to one of these least of my brothers, you did it to me". Obviously, He takes our membership in His family very, very seriously. That's the best of the Good News! So let our confidence grow more powerful than any other force in the universe. What is to prevent that? For Paul promises us, "That by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have the strongest comfort" (Heb.6: 17).

And these two things are the Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ, which are in us, the reborn, more securely than anything else that is in us. Is not our flesh and blood the very same flesh and blood of God, our brother and father?

Oh, that everyone, both reborn and unbaptized, could bear to receive the totality of this, best of the Good News from our Father, who creates within Himself a perfect and loving loneliness for the sake of all His children, and His children to be - our mysterious brothers and sisters who are as yet only known to Father. We don't yet know who they will be, but only that God wishes all men to be His real begotten, flesh and blood children, in truth, with holding nothing back within themselves from daring to fully believe that we really are, in fact, of His Flesh and Blood, and, therefore,directly of god. What power, then, in the whole universe, is strong enough to keep us from loving one another perfectly?

We have already discovered that there is a God, now all that is left is to decide whether or not we want to be part of Him. But as we decide, we must keep in mind that He killed for us, and He suffered and died for us, so that we would always have close at hand the sure knowledge that the truly baptized are of one blood with God by virtue of really and truly becoming Father's children by an absolutely perfect conception and birth.