Here is me talking about myself, hopefully this helps.
I was a boisterous child, an observer and a talker. I felt like it was my duty to mankind to be the class clown. I began talking and rapidly, holding conversations ever since the age of three. I crossed the main street road to get to a lake which I thought was a river at the age of two. I tried fixing a VCR TV due to its static image with a knife and batteries where the tape goes at the age of two. As you can imagine reader, I was a first-class mechanic and to make a long story short, we didn’t have a functioning TV due to my tinkering and we didn’t buy one for a long time, it’s a blessing that I didn’t die from getting electrocuted. I’ve been running to the pulpit since the age of three and have a picture of me holding a Bible at the age of three. I jumped into the deep end of the pool as a child, I was head strong and did everything that crossed my mind learning from the experiences. Concerning the pool incident, I nearly drowned as I was three and couldn’t get the hold on swimming till the age of eight. As I said I was a boisterous child, an adventurous child, a talkative child. Joking to my friends that my parents found horror shows to be okay for children and Barney the Dinosaur to be inappropriate since the Dinosaur will eventually devour the kids, while sneaking a book on dragons and dinosaurs from my parents. My parents were strict, yet unlike my older siblings they cuddled me and my younger sister more and gave us more freedom, leaving us to be spoiled. I always wanted more rather it was more clothes, more French Fries, more friends, more gadgets to make more friends and to be one of the cool kids, or more books. I was offended by anyone that made fun of my mom through yo mamma jokes, and adored my older sisters, I was proud of their accomplishments. I wanted to be like my older brother, he is in my opinion the coolest, most charismatic man alive. I was bullied for reading higher level books, so I didn’t try in class and sometimes purposely sabotaged myself to try to make more friends, I was a clown with tears. Yet I persevered and lived the same vicious cycle until my college days, caring for my family, friends yet always feeling like an outcast until my college days. I had believed in dinosaurs and that the earth is billions of years old and that the universe was 13 billion years old ever since watching videos on evolution as a child and I gained awe from the wonders of the unknown and science ever since watching the Magic School Bus as a child, leading to arguments with my family. This chapter is shorter as I don’t remember much about my childhood. My love for science was exchanged for philosophy when I entered my college days, yet I maintained my love for literature. I was a care-free child. My story has moments of darkness and of light, while in darkness my family prayed for me and prayed for God to open my heart towards his word. I am ashamed of the my past and I am thankful that God has saved me from myself and my shadow. I now fear my shadow and daily pray to be purified. To never go back and dear reader I ask you not to praise my past self but to know that atheism is in the product of death. That nihilism brings hopelessness and only faith can truly bring a humanitarian world view that makes sense. In the next chapter I will be discussing the angelic and the demonic.
Chapter 2: Demons and Angels
Gather up around the campfire, the angels are throwing down cigarettes whenever the archangel walks by them creating shooting stars. Those trusted leaders are watching over the other servants with a stern eye, punishing those that go against the law, at least this is what I used to think while reading an infamous author who created a demonology and angelic; angelism based on the philosophical school of phenomenology. Demons and angels by that school of thought are symbols, ideas that manifest themselves in our actions and narratives, we become fallen angels, angels throwing cigarettes down from the heavens creating shooting stars. I believe in the reality of angels and demons, what if I was to tell you they are beings outside of nature, that leak through the fabric of the natural and become infestations of our thought processes. As many know we cannot trust our instinct, and we must look at the Bible as our source of knowledge, where angels and demons are manifested and not as emblems of our conscious, subconscious or as hallucination, but as real beings. One may argue that Adam and Eve were schizophrenic for hallucinating a talking snake in a garden that led to the downfall of humanity through manifested pride, that of seeking knowledge and wanting freedom by becoming like God, the I am, the eternal itself. Yet it is a great moral story of epic proportions, one of fate and free will. At the brinks of eternal lives the ever destructive force of fate, but in its dawn lives the son, the son who was God manifested and allows us all to say that we are worms, sparrows, children of the upmost, to reconcile the relationship of the natural and supernatural, the children and God, the moon and the sun, in all of its light and beauty. The demon’s pry on the pillar of salt, and the aftermath of Lot and his daughters while the angels live and surround Abrahams children. God can make the rocks into descendants of Abraham while turning away pharisees, this is the cycle, the Bible is a story of angels and demons interacting with the Jews and with the Gentiles after the resurrection of Christ. The manifestations of nature, living in the mind and in the heart, leading the soul to self-sacrifice and taking over the imagination. Leaving us bored and hungry for more when we don’t read the Bible for a long period of time.
My name is David and this is my testimony of a time when I had a prophecy of the demonic sort of a relenting obsession that went against the idea of the cross and how I was able to wake up from my slumber and become a new being, an angelic being, allowing my mind not to be in darkness but in light. My mind has been put to rest, where the Holy Spirit exists, the devil cannot exist although our body still tempts us into sin, we overcome through the power of the cross, Christ has already overcome our sin we just need to believe in him. I remember back when I was an atheist, I viewed the death of war as a product of religion and the greatest evil in the world. That the many people who died in war had perished in vain, that due to war we have wronged the blood sacrifices to all gods. That this religious inclination towards war was the death of spirituality, that the demonic lived in it and therefore it made me mad, I refused the sacrifice of Christ in my own life. That we should perish for a ruler outside of ourselves was seen by me as an abomination, putting us in a place no better than that of a slave. That even being a martyr for Christ was playing the role of a slave, allowing fate to puppet us instead of striving for free will through quantum biology, through living for ourselves, and choosing the lion that needs to eat the sacrificed lamb in order for the circle of life to continue. I did not want to allow myself to be a tortured hero, a product of executioners, and a slave not only to religion but to the mad men, erratic men that murdered those that live according to their faith. In the lineage since +666, the time of Caesar’s triumphs. Yet Christianity lived on, when the countless phalanx gods passed from the earth to the sky. The idols went from the earth to the sky and evaporated into nothingness. How long is the path of the porphyry land under the feet of the tyrants that make themselves into Gods of the bloodless, inanimate ghosts of the living blood? At the time I decided not to be what I saw as a pawn, not to give a drop of blood for Christ. This world and its hypocrisy angered me so much that even if he was truly God, I decided that the blood of God should be shed in vain at least once. I wondered if there is one God in heaven, or perhaps three or three hundred through a myriad. I did no care, I did not want to reconcile under a king in unknown Eden or under the tyrants of Mount Olympus, I didn’t want to be a slave. With my inner being and with prophetic jest I fought against the idea of God and did not want anything to do with him, sadly I did not know that I had became flirtatious with the devil, a child of darkness, and this story is how I stumbled into madness and how I got out of its confines and into the arms of the Lord.
Chapter 3: The Encounter and my Philosophy
The Story begins in a sunny day, I had bought a carton of cigarettes and stole a 40. I was walking in south Seattle, in a poor neighborhood, and had walked into an alleyway. There I stumbled upon a homeless man and offered him a smoke and to drink from my 40. He looked at me in surprise as if I was crazy, dear reader you do know that drinking in public can lead to you going to jail. I was eighteen at the time and didn’t know any better, long story short I ended up drinking most of the beer, but he did take a cigarette. I ended up sharing with him details of my life such as that I was going to college, and I asked him about his life, he told me that he was once a gangster, a father and that he has hit rock bottom, his speech was incoherent and he spoke with a weird tone of voice, that I don’t remember, so I can’t describe it but I do remember him telling me that he has turned to Christ for salvation. He shared with me his miraculous story of being changed and born again and asked me if I believed that Christ is the lord, when I hesitated to answer and then told him no, he looked at me with sad eyes and told me I’m demon possessed. I took him as the type that would have a rabbit foot in his pocket, and to avoid the 13th floor, that he was a back wood, supernatural believer of ghosts and hobgoblins. So finishing the 40 I excused myself and begin walking away, he stopped me and asked me where I was going too, I told him that I am heading home, he looked at me and told me that he was once demon possessed and to be careful. I inquired and asked him what he means by demon possessed, and he told me that he drew demonic drawings based on Kierkegaard’s human nature theory of despair, which took him to a dark state of mind that he caressed and that he was afraid of. Kierkegaard’s theory was based on angst, and he wanted to reveal the angst of mankind, the darkness lurking within each heart, the demons walking under our roads. I looked at him puzzled, he then went on to tell me that the demonic is in destruction, asked for another cigarette and walked away, I thought that he is off his rockers and had visions of talking snakes, and talking burning bushes, and will someday be charioted away but in all seriousness I thought he was a hypocrite for preaching to me yet seeking a cigarette from me, perhaps he wasn’t unsure of what he said, and perhaps he is twisting scriptures. Nonetheless his words at the time didn’t affect me as I viewed him as someone that is destroying himself.
To give a bit of my back story I was a fervent believer of God as a child, even praying for the resurrection of dead people, but perhaps I didn’t do it in true faith as I wanted a spectacle and to be able to leave the funeral early due to boredom. I read my Bible and prayed with the family, but I never truly studied it and argued with people in the validity of the Bible but never feeling as if I was getting anywhere. I wanted to look holy, and ended up looking like a tool, I was obsessed with sin yet did my best to run away from the devil, I was a lost teenager from a Christian background who had yet to truly experience Christ and to be born again. Then I entered into College, studied philosophy and evolution with God and stopped believing in God, I took in the ideas of the four horsemen, and prophesied the destruction of the church, that like Nietzsche’s Ubermensch I will overcome the world, he was the Anti-Christ, the Devil himself, and I wanted to become the world and yet transcend it into God status, or at least that of a philosophical Rockstar. That I was going to go into rebellion against the Earth and it’s institution and through my death, I will transfigure into a God and just as Skovoroda I will be able to put into my epitaph ‘the world tried to catch me but could not’. That I will go against the world like the Messiah did as he went against the Sanhedrin and Roman Empire, but unlike him who came to bring salvation to mankind I had a different purpose in mind. I in my mind decided to transcend the church by rebelling against God by even coming up with the mathematical proof that proved God’s existence, I would put fate into my own hands and become all too human, a son of mankind; their God. As human nature was to rebel against God to become servants of their own will and to take control of their own fate. I was simply mistaken and a product of despair. I was just like Harley Quinn, I gained catharsis from Discord, knew that the cake in Portal was a lie, I wanted a sinister woman like GLaDOS as my muse, and wanted to die by being crucified on top of the Sistine chapel by my middle fingers and with my tongue sticking out after writing a book that would make Albert Camus blush. Albert Camus being the philosopher of absurdism or standing up to the absurd. I was a theologian of madness without spirituality, a walking paradox, as paradoxical as our world and the ever-quenching question of what it means to be human. After my conversation with the homeless man I began considering the framework of my thought. Nabokov may have created a gnostic spirituality for atheists based on having one’s eyes opened from solipsism by facing the objective, but unlike the blind man that was able to see in the gospels thanks to being healed by Christ, they ended up in despair and some even committed suicide, instead of radiating hope as was by the healing of the blind man in the gospels. I took a different approach, I wanted to build a spirituality of being a real-life troll and called it being a Gun with each provoking joke being a bullet. I wanted to checkmate the devil without truly believing in the devil nor in God’s existence. I was a byproduct of the metamodern.
I went from looking for a dark cynical woman as my muse to a histrionic woman… you know the type, the type that wears tight leather pants at a family church camp then complains that men are staring at her. I wanted to use such a woman’s emotions as inspiration for existential Christian stories. Now I want a godly woman, the type of woman found in the gospels perfuming Christ’s feet, washing them with her tears and drying them with her hair before the crucifixion. Here is the story to the transitioning of the phases, it starts in college when I was majoring in philosophy. I would go to bible studies and troll people there often coming in drunk, one time I came drunk and the youth leader said the surest proof of God’s existence is that of the resurrection, in a drunken state I blurted out that then Kenny from South Park is the greatest God of all time as he has resurrected after every episode. After youth he pulled me aside and told me that he doesn’t care what I did in my own time but that I should not to come church drunk as it makes me allot dumber, I had a lot of respect for him and took his advice to heart. At the time I was trolling everyone, everyone took me seriously and I through them was taking inspiration, the better my one-liners, the more I dumbfounded them the more inspired I became. I was a buffoon. I’m not going to share details on my crushes, but I will say that at the time I was infatuated by someone that found death boring and loved irony. Her dad was abusive towards her when she was younger, and she grew to become an atheist and a feminist. I once told her that she should become a prostitute to piss off her dad, she rebutted with that she respects the irony, and told me that she’ll commit suicide after getting baptized, she begrudgingly got baptized that year and moved out of her parents declaring that she is an atheist. Another female I was infatuated with was in love with my friend and they ended up getting married. While I was majoring in philosophy, I came up with one-liners to mock the philosophers, coming up with witticisms and using them in my stories, I was to later switch majors as I realized that philosophy won’t pay me well, I was a sophist. Later, I learned to be in love with wisdom, but that is when I gave my life up to Christ before that all I wanted was to be a comedian. Concerning Christ he opened up my heart to himself when I was in Hawaii, my mind was still closed to him but thanks to reading Ecclesiastes he planted a seed in my heart, which years later would blossom after reading The Brothers Karamazov, which was recommended to me by an atheistic professor, he recommended it because he told me that I will be able to relate to it, that it will open my hearts as deep down I am a Christian Existentialist. Dostoevsky is the Russian Orthodox edition of Kierkegaard whom he also recommended to me bringing my philosophy full circle back to what the homeless man told me, I didn’t want to caress darkness but be a servant of righteousness, a child of the light. Through reading Brothers Karamazov, I came face to face with the problem of suffering, and the poem of the Grand inquisitor. That Christ brings us internal peace, light and freedom, and that atheism leads to destructions, my eyes were opened to the gift that God has given us through his sacrifice. That he wasn’t simply a rebel who wanted to save mankind but the baston of mankind, that the crux of Christianity is freedom and that it was up to me to decide if I want to be a Christian, to take the leap of faith from insanity, and I did. That no one was going to force it on me, but thanks to Jesus I can be made new, a better person, that I was a parasite that fed of my own angst and others, that like the father in the book I was a buffoon, and deep down I wanted to be like the simple Christian son, Aloshya Karamazov. After this I read the gospels and came to the realization that there was no point in being a God or a Demi-God, a trickster like the Polynesian deity Maui, but that I wanted to live for Christ and not my own ambitions. That through the love of my family and friends; Andrey, Igor, Nazar, Nick, Vlad, Vitaly, Mariya, Yuriy, to name a few I wanted to change, they were there with honor wisdom and love even though I mocked them and made a mockery out of myself.
Chapter 4: Religiosity and Psychosis
When I left my atheistic phase, I became religious instead of spiritual. A hyena, perhaps the mentally challenged one from the Lion King. An insecure pharisee, mentally whipping myself for my sin, my past and every time I sinned. It was a dark time, I was both the slave and the master, I felt hopeless and unforgiving towards myself and others expecting perfection and falling into the gallows of depression daily. I wasn’t out in the sun smelling the fragrances of the flowers but in a self-built Hell. Chaining myself in shackles from grace and becoming a slave to the darkness, wanting to escape and hating myself. I wanted to be perfect without knowing in my heart that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross made me perfect, not knowing that I was a spiritual being and not a fleshly one. That I was a child of God even with my imperfections. That I was a work in progress. I at the time had fallen for a pious woman with a conservative background, she had a conservative stance on life and I tried to mirror that but I fell short, I viewed her as my forbidden fruit, I wanted to be her but felt like I couldn’t attain her. I was still a Gun although a religious one, I thought it was okay to experiment with drugs if I talked to people about God. At the time experimenting with psychedelics and weed. I also continued drinking and smoking, I was a work in progress, a religious hypocrite. Like the priest in Pushkin’s poem who was drowned by a mermaid by being pulled in by her seductive charm. At the time I was considering the option of going Ukrainian Orthodox and becoming a monk, to purify myself, I thought I had to redeem myself in the eyes of God and to become Holy and truly break from my use of drugs. I was a shallow man, an unwise man, I remember that when the leaders of the church told me to start looking for a girl after I read the Bible in three months to look for a person to get in a relationship with I told them that it was an unwise move, and that they didn’t know me enough to trust me, that perhaps I’m the devil in a human suit and that perhaps the people I brought to church were my minions, that before they told me to go for one of their daughters they should make sure I’m a Christian, and that I wanted to be right before Christ before I wanted to get in a relationship. I wanted to put my past behind me and to be a true Christian I just didn’t know how. At the time I wrote something later calling it the Shameful Man to describe my state of mind at the time. I have included it with this book. I have provided it in the end of this book as additional reading, all my other writings have also been added.
The idea of love and getting in a relationship got me thinking more and more on the idea of love. It also had me reflect more on myself, I went on to write my poem Pride. I at the time considered that pride was my issue, the issue behind my religiosity and my experimentation and playing games with sin, the root problem to hypocrisy. That same week I wrote the poem The Night Before as a way to rebuttal the influence that Dostoevsky had in me, and the sway that Orthodoxy had on me as I knew that not only did I not want to be a Gun, I didn’t want to be Orthodox, as I wanted to be Pentecostal so I painted the Virgin Mary not as saint but as a human person, a woman with doubts and questions, a woman that was relatable. A woman that gave herself up to God. I liked the woman from the church and wanted to be a in a relationship with her but through an angelic blessing she was in love with my friend and they ended up getting married. During this time, I came to the idea that Eros, the love a man and woman feel for one another, is a good argument for Gods existence. I created two stories to display this idea, the first showing how love and family triumphs over status and greed, that Eros points to Agape love. It’s called Repentance of a Sinner. The main character had the mentality of a Gun, I created stories about Gun’s to show that they too can be saved, as a proof to myself that I too can be saved. I also created a story based of a female Gun, to challenge myself to write from a female’s perspective, she is bestowed with a Gift from God with an encounter with a mysterious man. In this story I came up with my conception of God, not only his attributes but also his being, what it means to be the I AM. I based it of Pascals concept of God. The writing is called The Eden of Eve. The reason I was able to write so much was that I was beginning in my first manic episode, mania leaving me to be obsessed with religion and with love, but I was still not spiritual but religious, I didn’t leave the phase of beating myself up until recently, in the year of 2020. Which is when I began healing.
My mania became bad after writing and posting a discussion board post of wanting to have sex with everyone in my class, that everyone in the world is a manikin and that I wanted to blow up my temple and watch the fluff fly. I was reported in and luckily all I was told is that I should become more professional and the college left me with a warning. The counselor also told me that I have Manic-Depression after I told her that I’m the King of Anarchy and have three hundred million followers of reddit, that I am a celebrity, and that people follow me and take videos of all the philosophical stuff I say. I wasn’t wise but on the pretentions of a twenty-two-year-old I thought I was wise. Later on, the delusions went from celebrity to terrorist, a poisoner, a hacker of minds, a fallen angel, that I was the messenger Gabriel and that it is up to me to relay the message that the Anti-Christ is coming, which he definitely is, the Anti-Christ will be here and with him all the darkness of the world backing him up, repent! With that being said I begin hearing grandiose delusions of people talking about me and lusting after me, so I figured that Gabriel was the greatest seducer of all time and that I had to give that up and separate myself from the world and become ready for the final war in which Israel will go against the entire world. I ran four hours in the rain jumping over peoples fences in my shorts and a wifebeater, and threw my glasses, phone and wallet away as they were distractions. I was in God’s mercy, the only way I was able to be saved is through God’s mercy and I heard a prophecy that this is the only way, and that I will become strong again. I went to the hospital that December.
While in the hospital I had running thoughts and thought that a witch was talking to me and explaining the function of the world to me such as the fact that the world is eternal and the three great powers of the World keep the world in balance, the keepers of the world being the USA, China, and Russia. That before them it was the Ottoman empire, the Roman Empire and then the Egyptian Empire. This is obviously delusional as anyone with a Tolstoian background in history will be able to tell you, so either the witch was stupid, or it was a product of a chemical imbalance. It was resolved by me that it was the Devil feeding me the dumbest thoughts I had as a teenager and by my family as a spiritual battle within me, and by my doctors as a Schizoaffective Bipolar type. I repented to a local pastor and gave my life up to God as a slave to righteousness, God had shown me mercy, but I had yet to accept grace and figured that it was up to me to earn my salvation through living by God’s will instead of my own. When in I was in the hospital, I wrote the writing The Fall as a companion to Eden of Eve, of Alice getting saved as I felt like it was unresolved. I also wrote a Response to My Old Self, I was in the process of developing my world view and step by step coming closer to accepting that I was saved by Grace and not by my own actions, I saw my character Alice being resurrected from spiritual death, from being a dead soul. I left the hospital with wanting to be a better man, and not necessarily with the thought of what God wanted me to become, and without the thoughts on what God wants to do with me.
The timespan between the times I was in the hospital was a year. During this period, I became obsessed with the idea of consciousness. I wanted to explain it and I couldn’t accept the explanations that the materialists came up with or that the psychoanalysts came up with. My argument at the time was an artistic one, abstract art based on madness as an ontological variable. It was in my opinion able to be proved through thought experiments, which I will not list here but its aesthetic essence is that creation comes from destruction, or in other words through destruction there is creation, through the madness of the neurons comes the pragmatic concept of thought. I described this idea in my writing Knowledge and would later satirize it in the Typical Post of a Reddit User Lost in the Shadows. At the time in the hospital I re-gave my life to God and came to the realization that law and order was needed, that I have went from being a Gun to something else completely, that I must praise God and focus on stability instead of discord. During the time I was in the hospital I had also written a poem about mental illness called Mental Illness and went on to describing my wanting to overcome but I was still too foolish to put it in God’s hands but that was soon to change. I also wrote a short piece on human nature to fight the Grand Inquisitor that had taken root in my soul.
Chapter 5: The Present
Thanks to God’s mercy I am slowly learning, developing and growing in wisdom and a sound mind. I have found the answer to my dark prophecy that I have shared in the beginning, it is Love. God love’s us even when we rebel against him and like the Grand Inquisitor, he gives us a kiss in our cold, dead cheek when we voice against him. He reveals himself in tenderness and love yet also in magnificence and justice. God has shown me that he is a just God, and my dark self has been replaced thanks to the wisdom my mom has shown me through the help of the church and prophets, the revelation that I am a child of grace, that only through grace I am saved by keeping eyes on Christ as Peter did and not focusing on the storms. To not fall under the overwhelming powers of the dark forces but to know that I am loved. I am now stable and have written rebuttals to the idea that God is Dead in A Rebuttal to Nietzsche, Margarita’s Hope. A poem for Dostoevsky fans, named an Ode to Dostoevsky. A Christmas story inspired by my favorite oddest comedian Gogol named Merry Christmas. A fairy tale to fight back my fears that I have due to my disorder and against the idea of evil with the moral being don’t allow your nose to lead you. I have created more developed and mature proofs on God’s existence in A Journaling of a Young Scientist, and My favorite Proof of Gods Existence at the Moment. I have written poems about hope in Dawn, the Desert, Glory, the Windy Road, Notre Dame, Providence and Coronavirus. I have written a poem on beauty in the God of Noon. I have also written poems praising God in Jesus Christ and Blessed by Thy Ways. I have gone from a metaphysician of madness to perhaps one of love, thanks to Gods mercy I am now a born again Christian, a child of grace, thanks to the family and friends he has given me I know that I am loved, and that I am a work in progress. I am twenty-five years old and hopefully this is only the beginning of my journey, I have an entire lifetime to live for Christ and I’m excited that I have that opportunity. Dear reader this is my testimony, I have not covered anything from you, if you are now living in darkness, please believe me that spirituality, Christ are more than meaningful, that there is true hope, love, joy, peace to be found. Please take the leap of faith to a blessed life. God will be merciful with you no matter your past and will help you with every step no matter your flaws. Don’t live by your will but through Gods plan for your life as it is abundantly greater as I am having the privilege of learning. I have an entire lifetime to continue learning about God and myself. I hope you enjoyed this read.
