Romans 10:14 “But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them?”

Matthew 9:37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.

Luke 10:2 He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.

… And great earthquakes shall be in diverse places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. (Luke 21:11).

… Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken; (Luke 21:26)

Matthew 24:21 For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again.

Ezekiel 33:6 But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.

The term “birth pangs,” in terms of Bible prophecy, refers to certain convulsive geopolitical, geophysical, astrophysical, and worldwide socioeconomic events and issues scheduled to occur in the time leading up to Jesus Christ’s Second Advent (Second Coming). These are likened to the contractions experienced by a woman about to give birth, with those episodes increasing with frequency and intensity. Jesus’ foretelling of these birth pangs uses the word “sorrows” in His Olivet Discourse on end-time things to come. The Beast, NEOM Babylon, False Prophet-Mystery Religion, The ‘MARK.’ Plus MORE.

Matthew 24:37 But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

Genesis 6:9, 11, 12 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

Genesis 7:1-4  And the Lord said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

Genetic Defilement or Corruption (‘IN THE DAYS BEFORE Noah’)

Genesis 6:6 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

6 And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

Genetic Defilement or Corruption (‘as IN THE DAYS  of Noah)

Matthew 24:37 But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

Genesis 6:9, 11, 12 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

Genesis 7:1-4  And the Lord said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation. Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

Genetic Defilement or Corruption (‘IN THE DAYS AFTER Noah’)

Satan is trying to increasingly thwart the genetic lineage of humans with the arrival of the Savior, Chosen One, He who would bruise or defeat Satan, Jesus Christ, the Lamb. This is Satan’s plan or strategy to try to prove that God is a liar and ‘not in control.’ Fallen Angels or ‘Watchers’ AGAIN creating bastardized, hybridized, half human / half angelic Nephilim. Nephilim is a ‘generic’ name relating to ALL the various types and clans of evil hybrid humans, dependent upon the class or ranking or ‘type’ of fallen angel who ‘raped’ a human woman. This ALL occurred again, AFTER the flood. Satan was desperate to ‘pollute, corrupt or defile’ ALL flesh upon the earth to thwart the arrival of Jesus Christ through a genetic, human blood line or ‘lineage’ of humans. Satan, the dragon, did NOT know that Christ would ultimately come through the lineage of Abraham, Isaac, David, Jacob or Israel. God uses Israel to destroy the clans and tribes of Nephilim, during the second fallen angel incursion. (FIVE (5) Anakims, Moabites, Emims, Horims and Amorites. Types, clans or tribes of Nephilim. Genetically defiled, corrupted or bastardized hybrid human/angelic creatures.)

Genesis 6:4 There were giants (Nephilim) in the earth in those days [days of Noah – before the flood]; and also after that [after the flood], when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Numbers 13:32-33 And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. (Nephilim ‘clans or tribes’) And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. (Anak = Anakim, Nephilim children of Nephilim called or known as Anak.)

Deuteronomy 1:28 Whither shall we go up? our brethren have discouraged our heart, saying, The people is greater and taller than we; the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakims there.

Deuteronomy 2:9-12 9 And the Lord said unto me, Distress not the Moabites, neither contend with them in battle: for I will not give thee of their land for a possession; because I have given Ar unto the children of Lot for a possession. 10 The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; 11 Which also were accounted giants, as the Anakims; but the Moabites called them Emims. 12 The Horims also dwelt in Seir before time; but the children of Esau succeeded them, when they had destroyed them from before them, and dwelt in their stead; as Israel did unto the land of his possession, which the Lord gave unto them. (FIVE (5) Anakims, Moabites, Emims, Horims and Amorites. Types, clans or tribes of Nephilim. Genetically defiled, corrupted or bastardized hybrid human/angelic creatures. The ‘result’ of Satan coercing five (5) groupings or types or rankings of angels to rebel against God and rape women on earth. ‘They raped whatever women they chose.’)

Deuteronomy 3:1-11  Then we turned, and went up the way to Bashan: and Og the king of Bashan came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Edre. 2 And the Lord said unto me, Fear him not: for I will deliver him, and all his people, and his land, into thy hand; and thou shalt do unto him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites, which dwelt at Heshbon. 3 So the Lord our God delivered into our hands Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people: and we smote him until none was left to him remaining. 4 And we took all his cities at that time, there was not a city which we took not from them, threescore cities, all the region of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan. 5 All these cities were fenced with high walls, gates, and bars; beside unwalled towns a great many. (Nephilim ‘technology.’) 6 And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon king of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every city. 7 But all the cattle, and the spoil of the cities, we took for a prey to ourselves. 8 And we took at that time out of the hand of the two kings of the Amorites the land that was on this side Jordan, from the river of Arnon unto mount Hermon; 9 (Which Hermon the Sidonians call Sirion; and the Amorites call it Shenir;) 10 All the cities of the plain, and all Gilead, and all Bashan, unto Salchah and Edrei, cities of the kingdom of Og in Bashan. 11 For only Og king of Bashan remained of the ‘remnant of giants’; behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man. (9 ‘cubits’ is about 14 or 15 (5+5+5) feet)

Deuteronomy 9:1-2 Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven, 2 A people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak! Amos 2:9 9 Yet destroyed I the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath.

 2 Samuel 21:1-2, 15-22 (David of Israel, slaying the four (4) giant(s) of Gath, including Goliath)

Joshua 15:8 And the border went up by the valley of the son of Hinnom unto the south side of the Jebusite; the same is Jerusalem: and the border went up to the top of the mountain that liethbefore the valley of Hinnom westward, which is at the end of the valley of the giants northward:

Joshua 17:15 15 And Joshua answered them, If thou be a great people, then get thee up to the wood country, and cut down for thyself there in the land of the Perizzites and of the giants, if mount Ephraim be too narrow for thee.

Transhumanism and the Metaverse: Are We Doomed to Live in a Totalitarian Digital Prison? 60 (6) “stakeholders” in the World Economic Forum’s new Metaverse initiative. 6 = the number of an evil man. 6 = the Evil Beast, Prince, Antichrist. 6 = the Evil False Prophet, Pope or Pontiff. 6 = Evil Man’kind. ‘666’. The most evil that has ever been on the earth … past, present or future. ‘Doctrines of Devils.’ ‘The integration of technology into the body, the engineering of the immune system.’

Given all 60 “stakeholders” in the World Economic Forum’s new Metaverse initiative are large corporations, eager for a share of an $800 billion industry, one can assume the Metaverse technology will be used to extend the power of the corporate-government complex. So the question is, what is the Great Work before us, the true revolution that leaves no one behind to languish in a totalitarian medico-digital prison?

By  Charles Eisenstein 06/21/22 The Children’s Defender

1. The gospel of progress

Ever since the archaic divergence of humanity from other hominids, our systems of tools and symbols have developed at an accelerating pace. We depend less and less on the physical capacities of our bodies. We operate more and more in the realm of information: data, words, numbers and bits.

Quite naturally then, we have conceived an idea of progress that celebrates this development, and a destiny narrative that foresees its endless continuation. Its future is one where we integrate technology ever more fully into our bodies, until we become something more than just bodies.

It is one where we immerse ourselves so fully in representation, that virtual reality becomes more compelling to us than material reality. The first is called transhumanism, the second is the Metaverse.

Here is a typical example of this vision, courtesy of The Guardian:

“Ageing cured. Death conquered. Work ended. The human brain reverse-engineered by AI [artificial intelligence]. Babies born outside of the womb. Virtual children, non-human partners. The future of humanity could be virtually unrecognisable by the end of the 21st century…”

The title of the article is “Beyond our ‘ape-brained meat sacks’: can transhumanism save our species?” In it one can see a kind of anti-materialism, an ambition to transcend our biology, to transcend our very selves which are, the article suggests, little more than sacks of meat with a brain inside.

We are destined for more, better. This anti-materialist prejudice also shows up in the aspiration to end work — to end the requirement that we use our physical bodies to move matter — as well as in the ultimate ambition, to triumph over death itself.

We will have then indeed transcended biology, with its cycles, We will have transcended matter, with its impermanence.

That goal has always been implicit in the ideology known as progress. It equates the advancement of the human species with improvements in our ability to control nature and make its functions our own.

When we replace the shovel with the bulldozer, that’s progress. It aspires to a Godlike estate of lordship over nature. Descartes, arguably the most important preceptor of modernity, put it famously in his declaration of human destiny: to become through science and technology the “lords and possessors of nature.”

The passage following it prefigures the ambitions of The Guardian article quoted above. Descartes says:

“And this is a result to be desired, not only in order to the invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be enabled to enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth, and all its comforts, but also and especially for the preservation of health … and that we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age…”

Transhumanism is nothing new. It continues a prehistoric trend toward increasing dependency on, and integration with, technology. When we became dependent on fire, our jaw muscles shrank and our digestive enzymes changed.

The subsequent development, hundreds of thousands of years later, of representational language transformed our very brains. The material technologies of domestication, pottery, metallurgy and finally industry created a society wholly dependent on them.

Visions of silicon-brain hybrids operating digital control centers, served physically in all respects by robots, living wholly in an artificial reality, represent merely the culmination of a trend, not any change in direction.

Already and for a long time, humans have to some degree lived in a virtual reality — the reality of their concepts, stories and labels. The Metaverse immerses us in it still further.

Since transhumanism represents progress, it is no wonder that progressives tend to support it. A key tenet of progressivism is to bring the benefits of progress to all, to distribute them more fairly and universally.

Progressivism does not question its own foundations. Development is its religion. That is why the Gates Foundation devotes so much of its resources to bringing industrial agriculture, vaccines and computers to the Third World. That’s progress.

It is also progress to move life online (work, meetings, entertainment, education, dating etc.) Perhaps that’s why COVID-19 lockdown policies met so little resistance from progressives.

By the same token, ready acceptance of vaccines makes sense if they too represent progress: the integration of technology into the body, the engineering of the immune system to improve upon nature.

What leftists seem not to notice is that these versions of progress also enable the encroachment of capitalism into more and more intimate territories.

Do you think the immersive AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) experience of the Metaverse will be free of advertising, perhaps so subtly targeted as to be invisible? The closer our integration with technology in all aspects of life, the more life can become a consumer product.

Again this is nothing new. The Marxian crisis of capital (falling profit margins, falling real wages, evaporation of the middle class, proletarian immiseration — sound familiar?) has been forestalled only by the constant expansion of market economies through two main vehicles: colonialism and technology.

Technology opens up new, high-profit domains of economic activity to keep capitalism running. It allows more of nature and human relationships to be converted into money.

When we depend on technology for such things as clean drinking water, resistance to a disease, or interacting socially, then these things swell the realm of monetized goods and services. The economy grows, return on financial investment stays above zero, and capitalism continues to operate.

My dear leftists — if ye indeed remain leftists (and not authoritarian corporatists; that is to say, crypto-fascists) — can you please reevaluate your political alliance with the ideology of progress and development?

The promoters of the transhumanist Metaverse describe it as not only good, but inevitable. It may seem so, given that it is an extension of an age-old trend. I hope though that by making its underlying myths and assumptions visible, we can exercise a conscious choice in embracing or refusing it. We need not continue down this road.

Other paths fork out in front of us. Maybe they aren’t as well-lit or obvious as the eight-lane superhighway toward transhumanist technotopia, but they are available. A portion of humanity at least can choose to depart this particular axis of development and turn toward another kind of progress, another kind of technology.

2. Flavors spoil the palate

“Colors blind people’s eyes; sounds deafen their ears; flavors spoil their palates.” — Lao Tzu, “Tao Te Ching”

Years ago I took my son Philip with his friend to see a movie. We put on 3D glasses and were treated to all kinds of objects seemingly bursting out of the screen. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if the real world were 3D, just like the movies?” I jokingly asked.

The boys thought I was serious. “Yeah!” they said. I was unable to explain my irony. The on-screen reality was so vivid, stimulating and intense that it made the real world seem boring by comparison.

Well, it seems my 11-year-old was in good company. Consider these words from Julia Goldin, LEGO’s chief product & marketing officer:

“To us, the priority is to help create a world in which we can give kids all the benefits of the metaverse — one with immersive experiences, creativity and self-expression at its core — in a way that is also safe, protects their rights and promotes their well-being.”

Wowee, an “immersive experience.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? But hold on here — aren’t we already in an immersive experience called 3D reality? Why are we trying to recreate what we already have?

The idea, of course, is that the artificial reality we create will be better than the original: more interesting, less limited, yet also safer. But can the simulation of reality ever match the original?

That ambition rests on the further assumption that we can convert all experience into data. It draws on the computational model of the brain. It assumes everything is quantifiable — that quality is an illusion, that anything real can be measured.

The recent to-do about the Google employee, Blake Lemoine, who leaked transcripts of conversations he had with an AI chatbot who asserts its own sentience taps into the computational theory of the brain and consciousness. If even consciousness arises from the disposition of zeros and ones, then what is it for something to be real?

Neural net AIs seem to us to be modeled after the brain, but it may be more the reverse: we impose the neural net model onto the brain. (By neural net model, I mean the basic architecture of a graph of nodes and weighted connections, a set of firing formulas, an input and output layer and a feedback process to modify the connection weights.)

Certainly the brain has superficial similarities to an artificial neural network, but there are also profound differences that our computationalist prejudices ignore.

A catalog of neural states is much less than a full brain state, which would also include all kinds of hormones, peptides and other chemicals, all of which relate to the state of the entire body and all its organs.

Cognition and consciousness do not happen in the brain alone. We are beings of the flesh.

It is not my purpose here to offer a detailed critique of computationalism. My point is to show how readily we accept it, and therefore believe that one could engineer any subjective experience by manipulating the appropriate neurons.

Even if it cannot equal reality, the simulation is usually a lot louder, brighter and faster. When we enter the intense “immersive experience” of VR, AR and extended reality (XR), we become conditioned to its intensity, and suffer withdrawal when limited to the (usually) slow predictability of the material world.

Conversely, it is the stripping of intensity from real-world experience from within our safe, climate-controlled, insulated bubbles that makes AR/VR/XR attractive in the first place. Something else that happens with our habituation to intense stimuli is that we lose the capacity to exercise other senses and other modes of sensing.

Orienting more and more toward that which shouts the loudest, we no longer tune into quieter voices. Accustomed to garish colors, we no longer perceive subtle hues.

Fortunately, all that is lost may be recovered. Even standing silently in the woods for half an hour, the slow and the quiet come back into my reality. Hidden beings show themselves. Subtle thoughts and secret feelings rise to the surface.

I can see beyond the obvious. What lies beneath the loud rumbles and roars of today’s ubiquitous engines? What unmeasurable and unnamable things lie betwixt the numbers and labels of modern science?

What colors do we miss when we call the snow white and the crow black? What lies between and outside the data? Will our attempts to simulate reality leave out the things we already do not see, and thereby amplify our current deficiencies and biases?

I foresee a danger: that in building a transhumanist Metaverse we will construct not a paradise but a hell. We will incarcerate ourselves in a controlled and bounded finitude, deluding ourselves that, if we pile up enough of them, our bits and bytes, our zeroes and ones, will someday add up to infinity.

3. Chasing a mirage

Transhumanism is anti-natural, in that it does not recognize an innate intelligence in nature, the body, or the cosmos, but seeks rather to impose human intelligence onto a world it believes has none. Everything can be improved through human design (and ultimately, human-created AI design).

Yet, confusingly, many transhumanists deploy ecological arguments in their futuristic visions.

We will reduce our numbers and absent ourselves from nature, leaving the planet to rewild itself as we retreat into bubble cities and the Metaverse, subsisting on robotified vertical farms, precision fermentation factories, animal cell culture meat and artificial milk (“Mylk”).

Some conspiracy theorists point out that some prominent advocates of transhumanist technologies also advocate eugenics or population control policies. The connection is quite logical and needn’t imply monstrous evil. If robots and AI can replace human labor in more and more domains, then we need fewer and fewer humans.

This, they believe, will have the added benefit of lessening the burden of humanity on the planet. The same engineering mindset that “improves” the body and brain translates naturally into optimizing society, the genome and the earth.

That humanity is fundamentally a burden on the planet is an assumption partaking of the same exceptionalism that motivates the transcendent ambition to begin with. Perhaps if we conceived human destiny differently, we would not be such a burden.

If our ambition were not to transcend matter and the flesh, but rather to participate in the endless unfolding of more and more life and beauty on earth, we would be like other species: integral parts of an evolving wholeness.

Transhumanism holds a different ideal. As we bring tighter and more precise control to the human realm, we separate from the natural. Transhumanism is an expression of the much older idea of transcendentalism, which holds human destiny to lie in the transcendence of the material realm.

The Metaverse is the modern version of Heaven, a spiritual domain. It is a realm of pure mind, of pure symbol, of complete freedom from natural limits. In the Metaverse, no fundamental limit pertains to how much virtual land you can own, how many virtual outfits your avatar can wear, or how much virtual money you can have.

Whatever limits exist are artificial, imposed by the software engineers to make the game interesting — and profitable. Today there is quite a market for virtual real estate in the Metaverse, but its scarcity, and therefore its value, is completely artificial.

Yet that artificial value is substantial. Bloomberg estimates that annual revenues from the Metaverse will be $800 billion by 2024. Already, according to Vogue magazine, the online game Fortnite sells over $3 billion in virtual cosmetics annually, ranking it among the world’s largest fashion companies.

I wonder what the parents of the world’s 200 million stunted and wasted children think about that.

That last comment points to the dirty secret beneath all of humanity’s transcendentalist striving. Always, it visits great harm upon those it renders invisible. When one enters the Metaverse, it seems like a reality unto itself.

Its material substrate is nearly invisible; therefore, one easily believes that it has no impact on the material world outside its precincts. The more immersive it becomes, the more one might forget that anything exists outside it.

The same thing can happen any time we immerse ourselves in symbols and abstractions and forget their material substrate. So it is that economists, hypnotized by economic growth numbers, do not see the dislocation, misery and ecological ruin that accompanies them.

So it is that climate policymakers entranced by carbon math, do not see the devastation caused by lithium and cobalt mines. So it is that epidemiologists, obsessed with case fatality rates, seldom consider realities of hunger, loneliness and depression that fall outside their metrics.

It has long been thus with any reality we create for ourselves — we forget what lies outside it. We even forget that anything lies outside it. So it was in the metropolises of the 20th century.

Immersed in urban life, it was easy to forget anything else existed or was relevant, and easy to ignore the social and ecological harm entailed in maintaining them. The pattern repeats on every scale.

Enter the world of the super-rich, and again it exerts the same logic. The cost to the material and social world that maintains it is hard to see from inside the mansions and yachts where everything looks so beautiful.

Let us indulge in some metaphysical logic. Well-being is impossible in separation because being is fundamentally relational. Separating reality into two realms, both become sick — the human as well as the natural.

That is why I believe that the technological program, in its new extreme of transhumanism and the Metaverse, will forever chase a mirage. The mirage is Utopia, a perfect society in which suffering has been engineered out of existence and life gets more and more awesome every day.

Just look at the technological program’s track record. We have made enormous strides in our ability to control matter and manage society. We can alter genes and brain chemistry — shouldn’t we have conquered depression by now?

We can surveil nearly every human being at all times — shouldn’t we have eliminated crime by now? Economic productivity per capita has increased 20-fold in half a century — shouldn’t we have eliminated poverty by now?

We have not. Arguably, we haven’t made any progress at all.

The technocratic explanation is that we haven’t finished the job, that when our control is total, when the Internet of Things links every object into one data set, when every physiological marker is under real-time monitoring and control, when every transaction and movement is under surveillance, then there will be no more room in reality for anything we do not want.

All will be under control. This would be the fulfillment of the program of domestication that began tens of thousands of years ago. The entire material world will have been domesticated. We will have finally arrived at the oasis on the desert horizon. We will have finally reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

What if we never reach it? What if misery and suffering are a feature not a bug of the program of separation? What if the mirage recedes just as fast as we race toward it?

That is how it looks to me. I cannot be sure the human condition has worsened since Dickensian times, or Medieval times or even hunter-gatherer times. Some version of all our dramas and suffering seems to pervade every human society. However, I am quite sure that the human condition has not improved either.

Our seeming progress toward transcending matter and the suffering of the flesh has not brought us any closer to its goal. At best, the suffering has only changed form, if indeed it has not grown worse.

For example, thanks to air conditioning, we need no longer suffer extreme heat. Thanks to automobiles, we no longer need to tire ourselves to travel a few miles. Thanks to excavators, we no longer need to suffer aching muscles to dig a house foundation.

Thanks to all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs, we no longer need to feel the pain of various medical conditions. Yet somehow we have not banished pain, fatigue, suffering, or stress, even in the most affluent parts of society. If you pay attention when you are in public places, you will become aware of enormous, pervasive suffering.

Our heroic brothers and sisters bear it well. They hide it. They bear it. They do their best to be civil, to be kind, to be cheerful, to get by. But pay attention, and you will notice a lot of secret anguish. You will notice physical pain, emotional pain, anxiety, fatigue and stress.

Each person you see is divinity incarnate, doing its best under conditions that little serve its flourishing. Yet, even so, the beauty is still there, the divinity seeking relentlessly to express itself, life seeking to live. On those occasions when I am blessed to see that, I know myself as a Friend.

4. Virtual children of a virtual world

Perhaps it is human destiny to forever chase the mirage of total control, the conquest of suffering, the conquest of death. And despite the futility of that chase, it could be that we suffer no more than we ever have, albeit no less either. It is not my purpose here to put a stop to the transhumanist agenda, repugnant though I find it.

I write this essay for two, related, reasons. The first is to illuminate the basic character of that agenda, its origins and ambitions and especially its ultimate futility so that we might choose it or not choose it with open eyes.

Second is to describe an alternative that is viable whatever choice the bulk of humanity makes. Third is to pose a scenario of peaceful and amicable relations between the two worlds that diverge from this choice point in the Garden of Forking Paths, looking toward the day eons in the future when all the sundered souls of humanity reunite.

All right, that was three reasons, not two. The third one became visible only after I wrote down the first two. I could go back and change it and delete this entire paragraph, which is now getting comically self-referential. Doh! But sometimes I like to share the process of my thought.

It occurs to me that the colloquial use of the term “meta” to refer to self-referentiality is also an aspect of a dissociation from matter, which casts us into a realm of symbols. Cut off from the infinity-wellspring of the animate, material, qualitative world, we cannibalize the symbolic world that originally budded off from it.

We make stories about stories about stories. We make movies about toys based on movies based on comic books. Symbols come to symbolize other symbols, devolving into endlessly involuted self-reference.

Underneath its whimsical playfulness, its witty wordplay, its countless levels of abstraction lurks a horrible truth: We don’t care. A creeping cynicism pervades post-modern society, a numbness that whipped-up enthusiasm for the hyped-up Metaverse can dispel only temporarily.

Take for example the wonderful new innovation of virtual children. Yes, you read that right. Also known as “Tamagotchi children,” they are autonomous AI software bots programmed to flourish if they receive enough digital care and attention (and, presumably, purchased accessories).

Mainstream media touts them as a solution to loneliness, overpopulation and climate change. A recent Daily Mail headline reads: “Rise of the ‘Tamagotchi kids’: Virtual children that play with you, cuddle you, and even look like you will be commonplace in 50 years – and could help combat overpopulation, AI expert predicts.”

These articles are curiously devoid of reservations about such software. I don’t get it. Are we already living in two separate reality bubbles? Do people really think this is OK? To me, the most disturbing, the most flabbergasting thing about Tamagotchi children is their seamless normalization.

Though I must confess, the same thought has occurred to me with each step of the ascent into virtuality. Reality TV, for example. “Can people actually accept this as a substitute for involvement in each other’s stories in community?”

For all the hype though, for all the blithe acceptance, still I detect the aforementioned cynicism, detachment and despair beneath it. Are people actually excited about parading their avatars through online games, meetings and orgies in the Metaverse? Or is it just the best available substitute for what is missing in post-modern society?

I use the term “post-modern” here deliberately. As an intellectual movement, postmodernism dovetails with immersion in a world of symbols detached from matter.

The Metaverse reifies the postmodern doctrine that everything is a text, that reality is a social construct, that one is whatever one asserts oneself to be because is-ness is a mere discourse. So it is in the world of online avatars: Appearance and reality are one and the same.

Reality is infinitely malleable, arbitrary, a construct. So it seems to anyone immersed in the realm of representation. The symbol, forgetting it once symbolized anything, becomes real in its own right.

Commercial brands assume a value detached from the material substrate that gave them value in the first place. (Call it Gucci, and the handbag becomes valuable regardless of its quality.) Eventually, the product may disappear entirely into virtual reality, leaving only the brand.

In politics, much the same thing is happening. It’s all about optics, perceptions, image, the signal, the message. It is as if we are voting for digital avatars of politicians, not the real thing. No one takes the campaign promises of politicians at face value but hears them as signifiers.

That is why no one is surprised when none of the promises are redeemed. Do you even remember any of Joe Biden’s campaign promises? I certainly don’t. Maybe something about canceling student debt? No one got excited about it, because we discount and disbelieve politicians’ words as a matter of course.

Unfortunately, that allows them to enact horrible policies that few people would vote for — if they were voting for the policy itself and not the images obfuscating it. The more symbols absorb our attention, the more easily those who control information can manipulate the public.

Finally, let us not ignore the king of all symbols: money. It too is real only by convention, completely dissociated from anything material. It no longer symbolizes a measure of gold or a donation of wheat to the temple granary. It symbolizes nothing but itself.

Thus it suggests that wealth need have no relation to matter, to material productivity; nor need it suffer any material or ecological constraint. (I speak here not only of so-called “fiat currencies” like the U.S. dollar but, cryptocurrencies as well.)

As with other systems of symbol, towers of abstraction rise upon the foundation of money: financial indexes, derivatives and derivatives of derivatives.

At the present moment, it looks like the whole tower of abstraction is about to come crashing down, as the orphaned material world intrudes upon the pretend reality of money, protesting its neglect.

Since the orphaned material world includes all those the current system has dispossessed of their illusions along with their material security, we will undoubtedly face social turmoil. And it won’t just be the financial system that comes crashing down.

There are many other rooms in the tower of abstraction. Fewer and fewer people will find comfortable abode within them. At this point, the elites — whoever remains in the few undamaged bunkers of the old normal — will face a choice.

Either they retreat further into their bunkers, tightening their control over the growing ranks of the dispossessed, or they too flee the tower and join the rest of us in the real world. Practically, that means letting go of the entire global financial system; it means the cancellation of debt; it means the end of dollar hegemony and colonial extraction.

The elites faced a similar choice in 2008. They chose to extend and intensify their control, continuing to accumulate wealth by hollowing out the middle class, the global South and the natural world. Financial collapse will not by itself deliver us unto a new world.

We can choose to continue pursuing the transcendental program. Each aspect of it supports the rest. The dislocation of finance from matter is of a kind with the Metaverse’s dematerialization of experience and transhumanism’s separation of people from their bodies. All contribute to the same hollowing of substance.

It is therefore no wonder that their ideologues cohabitate with the financial and political elite in institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF). They hold a future in which we continue the path of Separation. But it is not the only future.

5. Separation and interbeing

Let us return for a moment to the broad question of whether simulated reality can ever truly supersede material reality. On one level that is a technical question, dependent on computational capacities and so forth.

On another level it is a metaphysical question: Can the universe be reduced to data? Is it discrete or continuous? Is the basic doctrine of the Scientific Revolution true, that everything real can be measured?

Certain philosophers and physicists say yes, because, they believe, our material reality is itself a simulation, a program running in some inconceivably mighty computer. Personally, I doubt it. Ever we apply the devices of our time metaphorically to the body and the universe.

In the machine age, the body was a complicated mechanism, and the universe a deterministic machine composed of separate parts. In the computer age, we decide that the brain is a digital wetware computer, with CPU and memory banks, and the universe is a software program.

If it is true that the simulation will always fall short of the reality, that quality will always escape quantity, that an AI baby programmed to mimic the developmental trajectory of a child will never equal a real human, then the void beneath the digital Metaverse, the cynicism and despair, will never go away.

But honestly, my wariness of the Metaverse does not depend on metaphysical doctrines.

I can be fair-minded and say that maybe there is nothing wrong with increasing machine-human, brain-computer integration; that maybe there is nothing wrong with people living in bubbles, interacting wholly in a digital gaming universe with virtual friends.

But actually, I don’t think it is OK at all, or perhaps I should say, it doesn’t feel OK. Anguish tears at me when I see today’s children immersed in the physically safe digital world, having virtual adventures while never leaving their bedrooms, unable to throw a ball or skip rope, never experiencing unsupervised imaginative group play.

I do not blame the screen-addicted kids for their affliction, nor do I blame their parents. When my grown sons were younger, I remember sending them outside to play.

They didn’t want to stay outside for long, because there was no one there for them to play with. Already, as a culture we were forgetting how to play, at least with our bodies, in materiality.

I remember one neighbor who wouldn’t let their children outside because there had been a case of Zika virus in the state. Obviously, that fear was a proxy for an unconscious fear of something else.

Few of us feel truly safe in modern culture, for we suffer the existential insecurity that comes from the modern displacement from the material world. We feel ill at ease, not at home. The world has been made Other, hostile, something from which to insulate oneself.

To such a person, the digital world — contained and safe, fully domestic — exerts an irresistible appeal. Seated in front of the screen, indoors, my child is safe.

Or so he seems. Eventually, the separation from the world will manifest as physical and emotional disease. Significantly, the real pandemic of our time is autoimmunity, allergies and other immune dysfunctions — maladies that cannot be conquered by controlling something external to the self. There is nothing to kill or to keep out.

Thus they mirror to us a forgotten truth: that the Nature we so cavalierly destroy is also a part of ourselves. We are more than interdependent with the rest of life, we are inter-existent. What we do to Nature, we do to ourselves.

That is the truth called interbeing. We will never escape that truth, no matter how far we retreat into our virtual bubbles.

Quite the opposite. The further we retreat into virtual bubbles, the greater our sense of displacement, the more ill at ease, and the further from home we feel. Lacking embodied relationships, one feels like a stranger in the world.

The root crisis of our time is a crisis in belonging. It comes from the atrophy of our ecological and community relationships. Who am I? Each relationship tells me who I am.

When someone knows not the stories behind the faces he or she sees every day, or the names and uses of the plants, or the history of a place and its people; when the outdoors is just so much scenery populated mostly by strangers; when one has no intimate companions outside the nuclear family; when one does not know well and is not well-known, then one can barely exist, for existence is relationship.

The insecure, isolated individual that remains is always anxious, susceptible to manipulation and an easy target for marketers selling tokens of identity.

He or she will eagerly take up whatever politically generated identities are available, aligning with an us against a them to gain a fragile sense of belonging. And, the comfort of the digital world will easily seduce that person into replacing lost material relationships with digital ones.

I just said that we can never escape the truth of interbeing no matter how far we retreat into our virtual bubbles. We cannot escape it, but we can postpone it. Maybe, paradoxically, we can postpone the inevitable forever.

Collapse will not save us from our choices. Each new dysfunction, each new physical, mental, or social disease, can be palliated with yet more technology.

Tamagotchi children may fail to assuage the loneliness of life in a bubble, but fortunately, modern neuroscience has identified the precise arrangement of neurotransmitters and receptors that create the feeling of loneliness. We can modulate those — problem solved!

And if that causes some other deficit, why, we can fix that too. Someday, when our control over genes and brain chemistry and body physiology is perfected, finally we will have achieved heaven.

There is no limit to the power of technology to fix the failings of technology, just as there is no limit to the aforementioned tower of financial abstraction that uses debt to finance payments on previous debt. Yet never do we arrive in heaven.

In all these instances, the tower is none other than the Tower of Babel: a metaphor for the attempt to attain the infinite through finite means. It describes the quest to perfect virtual reality, to create improved versions of everything natural (synthetic mylk, for example, or genetically modified strawberries, or artificial wombs, or online adventures).

Bill Gates: Rich nations should shift entirely to synthetic beef

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/14/1018296/bill-gates-climate-change-beef-trees-microsoft/

We devote tremendous efforts to this tower-building project, but we never get any closer to the sky. Granted, we are no further from the sky either. We have risen high indeed and have a long way to fall.

Precarious, rootless, many begin to question the project and the enormously complicated edifice that sprawls across the ruins of original cultures and ecosystems.

What would civilization look like if we built for beauty and not for height? If we did not use the things of earth to attempt to leave earth behind?

The Zika scare, of course, was but a foreshadowing of the social calamity that was to follow in 2020. Whole families barely ventured out of their homes for weeks and months at a time. Life accelerated its flight into the digital realm.

Work, meetings, school, leisure, entertainment, dating, yoga classes, conferences and more moved online — a small inconvenience, it was said, to save millions of lives. Whether many lives were actually saved thereby is a matter of dispute; my point here focuses on the other part: the “small inconvenience.” Was it really so small?

Was it a mere inconvenience? Is digital life a near-adequate substitute for in-person life? (Soon to become adequate as technology advances?) That depends largely on the metaphysical questions I raised earlier.

Here again, though, I would like to appeal not to the mind but to the body to answer the question of whether digital life can be an adequate substitute for real life. During the lockdowns, I could feel myself withering. To be sure, an initial period of retreat was welcome for many people, a break in the routines of normalcy.

Over time though, many of us began to show signs of emotional and social malnourishment. Even the politicians who imposed the most draconian mandates violated them themselves. Why? Because lockdowns were inhuman. They were anti-life.

Now I suppose some people were totally fine with lockdowns and social isolation and would prefer it if we never went back to normal. They might say it is for safety, but I suspect something else is at work. During COVID I became accustomed to my little cage and developed a kind of agoraphobia.

I wasn’t worried about getting sick; I was freaked out by the medical rituals of masking and distancing overtaking society. So, albeit for different reasons from the COVID-orthodox, I too retreated partly into a digital world. When I emerged, it was with a bit of trepidation, the kind one feels entering strange territory.

Imagine what it is like for people who even before COVID felt alien or unsafe in the world. They might hesitate much more than the rest of us to venture out again, and welcome the enrichment of the isolation bubble that the Metaverse offers.

I have described centuries-long trends and deep unconscious narratives that contribute to the transhumanist agenda. If we try to understand it as simply a dastardly plan by Klaus Schwab & Co. to take over the world, we miss 99% of the picture. We miss the forces that produce a Bill Gates, a Klaus Schwab and the technocratic elite.

We miss the ideologies that give them power and dispose the public to accept their plans. These ideologies are far beyond the intellectual capacity of men like Gates and Schwab to invent. They are deeper, in fact, than the word ideology suggests. They are aspects of what one can only call a mythology.

6. Parallel societies

Any alternative to the transhuman future must draw from a different mythology. But the mythology, at least the part of it comprising narrative and belief, is secondary. The alternative to transhumanism and transcendentalism generally is to fall back in love with matter.

It is to accept our place as participants with the rest of life in an inconceivable process of creation. Instead of seeking to transcend our humanity, we seek to be more fully human. We longer seek to escape matter — not through the digital means of the Metaverse, nor its spiritualized version.

Here I am writing about it. Here I am, putting into concepts a call to reverse the flight into concepts. I hope you can hear the voice behind the words, and sense the flesh behind the voice.

Those who fall back in love with matter will discover that the beloved bears unforeseen gifts.

For example, when we reverse the quest for health-by-isolation and embrace relationship with the microbial world, the social world and the wind, water, sunlight and soil of the natural world, when we acknowledge the subtle dimensions of matter — frequency, energy and information — then new vistas of healing open up that do not depend on killing a pathogen, cutting out a body part, or controlling a body process.

Progress need not come through imposing order onto the world. It can come through joining in greater and greater, subtler and subtler levels of preexisting and unmanifest order.

The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair slogan may as well be the motto of the modern age: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.” The doctrine of inevitability has long been a main thread in the narrative of technological progress. Science and technology will keep progressing, and it is up to us to adapt.

But are we really so helpless? Are we but tools of technology? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? History offers signal examples, scant though they may be, of conscious rejection of technological progress: the early 19th-century Luddites and the contemporary Amish come to mind.

Hold on a second, I have to change my typewriter ribbon. OK. To say brain-computer interfaces, wearable computing, genetically-engineered humans, the Metaverse, or the internet-of-things are inevitable basically declares that you have no choice in the matter, that the public has no choice. Well, who says?

Those who are withholding the possibility of choice, that’s who. The logic is circular when an unelected elite organization like the WEF declares that certain futures are inevitable. Maybe they wouldn’t be, in a fully informed, sovereign democratic society.

Let’s be suspicious of centralized institutions proclaiming the inevitability of technologies that enhance the power of centralized institutions.

Perhaps it is inevitable that at least some portion of humanity will continue to explore the ascent of humanity away from matter. Despite the futility of its Utopian ambitions, that exploration will undoubtedly uncover new realms of creativity and beauty.

After all, the symphony orchestra, the cinema and the jazz quartet all depend on earlier technologies that were part of humanity’s separation from nature. Beauty, love and life are irrepressible. They burst out everywhere, no matter how tight or stifling the matrix of control. Nonetheless, I know I am far from alone in saying, “That is not my future.”

I am not alone in wanting to be more embodied, closer to the soil, less in the virtual world and more in the material, more in physical relationship, closer to my sources of food and medicine, more embedded in place and community. I might visit the Matrix sometimes, but I don’t want to live there.

Enough people share those values that the possibility of a parallel society is coming into view. We are OK with some people choosing to explore human beingness in the Metaverse, as long as we are not forced to live there too.

The two societies might even be complementary to each other. Eventually, they may split into two separate, symbiotic species.

Let’s call them the Transhumans and, if you’ll indulge me, the Hippies. I have had a soft spot for hippies ever since I first spotted some in the wild. It was in an Ann Arbor park in 1972.

“Who are they?” I asked my mother, pointing to some people with long hair and beads.

“Oh, those are hippies,” said my mother in a matter-of-fact tone. My four-year-old self was fully satisfied with the explanation.

Back in those days, the hippies questioned the ideology of progress. They explored other paths of human development (meditation, yoga, psychedelics). They went back to the land. They wove their own baskets, built their own shacks, made their own clothes.

The Transhumans are distinguished by their progressive merger with technology. They depend on it for survival and more and more functions of life. Their immunity depends on constant updates. They cannot give birth unassisted — C-sections become routine (this is already happening).

Eventually they incubate fetuses in artificial wombs, feed them artificial Mylk, care for them with AI nannies. They live full-time in VR/AR environments, interacting with each other remotely from separate bubbles. Their material lives dwindle over the generations.

Initially they emerge regularly from their insulated smart cities, smart homes and personal protective bubbles, depending on what viruses or other dangers are circulating. Over time they leave home less and less frequently. Everything they need arrives by delivery drone.

They spend most of their time indoors, for as they grow increasingly conditioned to precisely controlled environments, the unconditioned outdoors becomes inhospitable. (Already this has happened as people get addicted to air conditioning. Americans on average spend 95% of their time indoors.)

They also spend more and more of their time online, in digital and virtual spaces. To facilitate this, technology is integrated directly into their brains and bodies. Sophisticated physiological sensors and pumps constantly adjust body chemistry to keep them healthy, and they soon cannot stay alive without them.

In the brain, computer-neural interfaces allow them to access the internet at the speed of thought and communicate with each other telepathically. Images and videos are delivered straight to their optic nerve.

Official announcements can be delivered directly to their brains as well, and advertisers pay them per minute to allow commercial messages to be piped in. Eventually they can no longer distinguish between endogenous images and those from the outside.

Control of misinformation can be extended to the neurological level. Over time, their capacity for cognition too becomes technology-dependent, as the brain merges with AIs and the internet.

(Again, this is but the continuation of an ancient trend that started perhaps with writing. Literate people export some of their capacity for memory onto written records. It is not uncommon for pre-literate people to be able to repeat a thousand-line poem after hearing it once.)

In this society, basic physical functioning, social interaction, immunity, reproduction, imagination, cognition and health all enter the realm of goods and services. New goods and services mean vast new markets, new domains for economic growth.

Economic growth is essential for a debt-based currency system to operate. The Transhuman economy therefore enables the current economic order to continue.

The Hippies decline to walk this path, and in fact reverse some part of the technological dependency that is already normal in 2022. This too is already happening.

My children were born with less technological intervention than I was. The Hippies wean themselves off of pharmaceutical props to health, in some cases accepting higher risks and earlier deaths, but in the long run enjoying more vitality.

They return — are already returning — to natural childbirth. (This is no easy matter, as many women who tried natural childbirth and ended up in a hospital can attest. After centuries of dietary degeneration, physical trauma and patriarchal domination of women’s bodies, the healing might take generations too.)

They reverse, to a degree, the exquisite division of labor that marks modern society, growing more of their own food, building more of their own houses, being more directly engaged in meeting their material needs on an individual and community level. Their lives become less global, less technology-dependent, more place-based.

They redevelop atrophied capacities of the human mind and body, and discover new ones. Since they do not routinely use technology to insulate themselves from all threats and challenges, they stay strong.

Because the Hippies are reclaiming vast areas of life from the realm of goods and services, their society upends the familiar economic order. The role of money in life diminishes. Interest-bearing debt is no longer the foundation of their economy.

Alongside the shrinking financial realm, new modes of sharing, collaboration and exchange flourish in a growing gift economy.

The Hippies see labor as something to embrace in proper measure, not to minimize. Efficiency gives way to aesthetics as the primary guide to material creation, and aesthetics integrates the entire process of procuring, using and retiring materials.

As individuals, in their communities and as a global culture, they devote their creative powers to beauty above scale, fun above security and healing above growth.

7. The Great Work

Today we see early signs that humanity is resolving into two societies. What if we bless each other with our choice, and strive to make room for it? It could well be that the Transhumans and the Hippies need each other and can enrich each other’s lives.

For one thing, because the paradise of control is a mirage, the material world will forever intrude upon the Metaverse in ways that robots and AI won’t be able to address. Someone will have to fix the leaky roof on the computer server farms.

The Transhumans will never fully realize the goal of replacing human labor with machine labor.

However, they will develop technologies based on abstraction, computation and quantity to an extraordinary degree, which in some circumstances can be put in service to the Hippies when they face a challenge requiring those technologies. And they can share the wonders of art and science they create on the transhuman path.

Both societies share certain challenges and live on a common planet. They will have to cooperate if either is to flourish. Perhaps the most significant common challenge is that of governance and social organization. While the transhumanist Metaverse today has overtones of totalitarian central control, it need not be that way.

One can easily imagine a decentralized digital society, just as one can imagine a centralized low-tech society. Many ancient societies were exactly that. Neither path, the Transhuman nor the Hippie, is proof against the age-old scourges of tyranny, civil violence and oppression.

Actually, I don’t fully believe what I just wrote. The ever-increasing control over matter that transhumanism requires goes hand in hand with social control. They come from the same worldview: progress equals the imposition of order onto chaos.

Given that all of the 60 “stakeholders” in the WEF’s new Metaverse initiative are large corporations, eager for a share of an $800 billion industry, one can safely assume that Metaverse technology will be used to extend and consolidate the power of the corporate-government complex.

It is not as some people say: “Technology is neutral, it depends on how we use it.” Technology has the values and beliefs of its inventors built into it. It appears in a social context, meets a society’s needs, fulfills its ambitions and embodies its values.

Inventions that don’t fit are marginalized or suppressed. Some such technologies, such as those in holistic health, thrive in the near suburbs of official reality. Others, such as free energy devices, languish in the far reaches of unreality, so violently do they contradict what the knowledge authorities believe is real.

Neither is value-neutral nor system-neutral. They both are democratizing. The former, requiring much less expertise and high-tech infrastructure, returns medicine to the people. The latter literally decentralizes and democratizes power.

In contrast, most of the medical technology of transhumanism casts ordinary people into a consumer role. Swallow this pill. Receive this injection. Implant this device.

Nonetheless, there is truth in the above words-I-do-not-fully-believe. Notwithstanding the embedded values in technology, we face a more fundamental choice than what technology to use or refuse.

Imagine what surveillance technology would do if it were directed by the people at the government, rather than by corporations and government at the people. Imagine if every government decision and expenditure were fully transparent. This idea taps into one of the principles that run deeper than technology: transparency.

Lies, gossip, secrecy and information control can turn any society, Stone Age or Digital Age, into a hell. Dehumanization can turn any society into a slaughterhouse. Good-versus-evil narratives can turn any society into a war zone.

That means we who sound the transhumanist alarm have more work to do than merely to oppose certain technologies and political powers, more to do, even, than to build parallel institutions. We Hippies might roll back technology a little or a lot. We might keep using the internet, cars, excavators, chain saws and hunting rifles.

Or maybe over generations we give them up. Maybe we again dig house foundations with picks and shovels. Maybe we return to the bicycle, or the donkey. However, I feel no excitement about a future that is only a return to the past.

I am sure that the miraculous technologies enabled by the human journey of Separation are here for a reason. The pure melody of the lonely shepherd’s pipe does not diminish the value of the symphony orchestra. Both express a love affair with matter.

So the question is, what is the Great Work before us that is common to any technological context? What is the true revolution, the revolution of consciousness, that leaves no one behind to languish in a totalitarian medico-digital prison?

I won’t at this moment offer succinct or tidy answers to such questions. The questions themselves have more power than their answers. They invite us into compassion for all human beings. They return us to the truth of our inter-existence.

They remind us that, just as we have not given up on our fellows, God will never give up on us. They attune us to the knowledge that if the situation were hopeless, we would not be here to meet it.

They ask us to consider who we are and why we are here; what, and why, a human being is. Whatever the Revolution is, surely it goes all the way to these depths.

So I ask again, what is the Great Work before us? Be fierce in rejecting any answer that your soul knows is untrue, however flattering it may be to your righteousness. Be gentle in your judgments, so that clarity of purpose has room to grow.

Be grateful as you discover the joy, ease and humor that the Great Work makes available. Be confident in the true knowledge that we are ready to accomplish it. Rejoice in the renewal of our love affair with the world of matter and flesh.

Originally published by Charles Eisenstein on Substack.

‘7’ Paul Rolland, Night Watchman, Night Watchman Ministries:

The ‘Oldest’ Lie in Satan’s Book of Lies; The ‘Promise’ of Transhumanism (that we can be ‘live’ or be as Gods forever, an eternal life,  in a ‘mortal and fallen state’ apart from Christ.) And Eve took a ‘bit out of the apple,’ believing the lie of serpent that she could live and be as a ‘god’ forever.

Genesis 2:16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Genesis 3 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: (Satan’s LIE)

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Satan’s LIE)

6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

8 And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

9 And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

13 And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

(Naked = sinned, disobeyed, didn’t take God seriously, didn’t follow the ‘instructions’ or ‘didn’t take God at His word.’ Adam knew he ‘screwed up’ BIG TIME, but didn’t realize that his mistake caused ALL of mankind to live in a ‘fallen / sinful’ state ever since. Hence, the need for Jesus Christ’s salvation to ‘fix things and get things right’ between man and God. Adam tried to ‘cover-up’ the fact that he sinned, so he blamed the woman. And the woman in turn blamed the serpent. And in turn, God ‘displaced’ Adam and Eve and the Serpent out of the Garden of Eden. )

‘One bad, rotten apple spoiled the barrel of humanity.’

Biblical ‘Proof’ that some form of ‘transhumanism’ or genetic manipulation or modification IS AT PLAY during the tribulation.

Demonic Locusts, Men ‘desire to die’ … but can’t or are unable to die (death flees from them).

Revelation 9 And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

2 And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

3 And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

4 And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

5 And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.

6 And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

7 And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.

8 And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.

9 And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

10 And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

11 And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

Noisome and ‘Grievous’ Sores (Killing Blisters or Ulcers). Men desire to die, but are unable.

Revelation 16 And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.

2 And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.

Scorched with fire and great heat (Solar flares?), but they still lived and blasphemed God.

Revelation 16:8 And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.

9 And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory.

10 And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain,

11 And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.

Great Hailstones (weighing each between 75lbs to 100lbs) literally hitting men. Imagine the velocity of a ‘stone’ weighing 100 lbs being dropped from several miles up in the sky, AND hitting you. A stone about the size of a golf ball is big enough to kill a person, if hit in the head. Yet, ‘death flees’ these men. How can they withstand 100lb hailstones hitting them?

Revelation 16:21 And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.

Thus, God gives us four (4) clues of ‘equal weight, balance, accuracy, emphasis, intention or purpose.’ 1. Grievous Sores (killing blisters or ulcers), 2. Scorching Heat (solar flares). 3 Demonic Locust Poison bites for five (5) months, 4. 100lb hailstones. Men suffered these ‘afflictions,’ didn’t die and still had the energy and nerve to blaspheme God. They should bedead, but are still ‘living’.’ Somehow, they had a ‘Satanic false immortality’, yet they eventually decided it was better to die. ‘Be Careful What You Ask For, You Just Might Get It.’ This is Transhumanism, in a mustard seed.

Transhumanists take science as their religion and believe in a philosophy of “absolute relativism” that claims that individuals can change reality at will, and they seek to “relativize the human being” and “turn it into a putty that can be modified or molded to our taste and our desire and by rejecting those limits nature or God have placed on us.”

Transhumanism therefore requires “the destruction of “the Judeo-Christian morality, which is based on absolute principles and values.”

Ultimate end: redefining and reconfiguring the human nature and condition. A fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines among the physical, digital and biological spheres.

Those technologies include genetic engineering such as CRISPR genetic editing, artificial intelligence (A.I.), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and quantum computing.

Transhumanists propose to use technology to alter human nature to produce human beings with “super longevity, super intelligence, super well-being,” Lukacs said.

https://www.capitalfrontiers.com/single-post/2020/06/10/cities-for-people-or-people-for-cities-neom-is-breeding-a-new-city-built-around-genetic-e

They reject the Christian belief in absolute truth, and that God created human person in His image and likeness, and see absolute values as “a brake for their pretensions of transhumanist and globalist progressivism.” (‘Lost Imager Status,’ ‘Eternal Damnation for taking the ‘Mark, Number or Name,’ ‘And they became vain in their imaginations.’)

Transhumanists propose to increase longevity by using CRISPR genetic editing.

But how can they call on him (Jesus Christ) to save them unless they believe in him (Jesus Christ)? And how can they believe in him (Jesus Christ) if they have never heard about him (Jesus Christ)? And how can they hear about him (Jesus Christ) unless someone tells them?” —Romans 10:14

In His Service,

Night Watchman

Paul Rolland

Night Watchman Ministries

Make Your Decision for Christ NOW!!!!!!! Time is Up!!!!!!!

Jesus Christ’s Offer of Salvation:

The ABCs of Salvation through Jesus Christ (the Lamb)

A. Admit/Acknowledge/Accept that you are sinner. Ask God’s forgiveness and repent of your sins.

. . . “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23).

. . . “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one.” (Romans 3:10).

. . . “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8).

B. Believe Jesus is Lord. Believe that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be; that He was both fully God and fully man and that we are saved through His death, burial, and resurrection. Put your trust in Him as your only hope of salvation. Become a son or daughter of God by receiving Christ.

. . . “That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:15-17). For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13).

C. Call upon His name, Confess with your heart and with your lips that Jesus is your Lord and Savior.

. . . “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” (Romans 10:9-10).

. . . “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” (John 1:8-10).

. . . “And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. (John 2:2).

. . . “In this was manifested the love of god toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.” (1 John 4:9, 14-15).

. . . “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:8-10).

. . . “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:23).

. . . “Jesus saith unto them, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6).

. . . “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.” (Romans 1:16).

. . . “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” (Acts: 4:12).

. . . “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth for there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” (1 Timothy 2:4-6).

. . . “For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 5:9).

. . . “But as many as received him, to them gave the power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” (John 1:12).

True Church / Bride of Christ Spared from God’s Wrath:

 Romans 5:8-10. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”

Romans 12:19. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

1 Thessalonians 1:10. And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.

1 Thessalonians 5:9. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ,

Romans 8:35. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

Jeremiah 30:7. Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble, but he shall be saved out of it.

Revelation 3:10 Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.