A Brief History of the End of Time

The Antichrist is one of the most popular and sought after figures of Scriptures, even so attractive that he has prevailed outside the borders of Christendom and entered general culture. He is a mysterious villain of which the prophets spoke but who still needs to be identified and can be anybody really. Throughout the ages the sinister predicate has been stapled on the names of popes, emperors, Reformers, even entire systems of belief and government, diseases, art forms and artists. It almost seems as if humanity has searched for the Antichrist with one of Bill Gates' search engines and a torrential avalanche of vaguely resembling but hardly relevant pages have been proudly turned up. But all died or are about to die by the looks of them, and nothing notably happened and the hunt is still on.

We know of the existence of the Antichrist through the works of writers such as Daniel, John the Revelator and the Apostle Paul, and even directly from Jesus Christ Himself. But he is mentioned by name only in the first two letters of John, and many exegetes throughout the history of Christianity have proceeded with great enthusiasm to link pretty much everything gruesome that has been written about anybody bad to this illusive figure. And this includes the number 666, which according to Revelations is the human number of a certain beast that will rise or has already risen from the earth (as opposed to another beast that has its origin in the sea). Here is wisdom, says John, Let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast.

Well, to start with, according to Solomon wisdom begins with the fear of God, not with the fear of Bill Gates and certainly not with the fear of the devil. Additionally, the Bible rarely or never associates wisdom with the cognitive craftiness that is needed to convert modern English letters into even more modern ASCII-codes. As Saul Robeson once observed in the movie pi: any number can be found anywhere if one wants to find it bad enough. And especially when you're willing to bend your data a bit to find what you're so diligently looking for.

The number found in Revelations, for instance, is not 6-6-6, which would indeed transliterate to w-w-w in Hebrew, and we all would be in trouble, but 666; six-hundred sixty-six (chi-xi-sigma), which cannot be transliterated into Hebrew because the Hebrew alphabet stops at the letter taw, which stands for 400. The number 600 is assigned to the final form of mem, that's when it occurs as last letter of a word.

And the number 666 itself; what is it? John invites the insightful among us to reckon or calculate the number, but numbers as we use them are only valid if we also have the sequence or geometry that they are part of. So, is 666 a coordinate? A quantity? A code of some sort or the outcome of an equation such as the one wielded by the name-number transliterators? And why is such an important entity given a number for its designation? In all other cases Scriptures implores names only to designate a person. Scriptural names are often common words or compounds and most often cover the acts or position of the character in the narrative. It is highly unusual for Scriptures to engage a number to an entity and instead of crying 'crucify! crucify!' when yet another man of obvious greatness has arisen, the people of planet earth should chill and critically study the matter before they pass their judgment, if they should judge at all. (While working on the Chaotic Set Theory the number 666 came rolling most serendipitously out of the equations; not wisdom, just dumb luck.

The noun christ, on which the word antichrist obviously hinges, comes from the common verb creo, which means to anoint (as the Hebrew verb mesah, from which comes the noun messiah). Anointing was the act of pouring oil over someone's head in order to indicate this person's social position. People that were anointed always stood on top of the hierarchical ladder — kings, high-priests and prophets — and the only thing these people had in common was that they were not subjected to any other human person. Anointed ones were sovereign and worked for God alone, and they were to seek the ways of the Creator and pass them on to the people. The most general definition of the antichrist therefore is that which rules and directs the world without the authority that comes with the knowledge of its purpose and destiny.

The collective human mind works very much the same way as the biosphere. Ideas are like seeds that need to be watered to grow, to catch root and to participate in the larger economy. And when they do they will excrete water, gasses and fruits and deposit these back into the economy, to serve as nutrients for next generations. Kings, high priests and prophets were supposed to tend the mental garden and secure the diversity that the Creator had made, and tune in on the Voice of the Creator that sounds from all His works (and which should not be confused with any religious manifesto).

Money is funny stuff. A dollar-bill in our wallet is not valuable itself but a mere representative of value; a claim to value. And value to the economy is like water to the biosphere. Ideas generate money and money is needed to turn ideas into tangible applications. What happens at Microsoft and at every other large corporation is that money is distracted drop by drop from the creatures of the plains, and instead of allowing it to form into clouds that pour out over broad sweeps of the earth without favor, it is collected into storage funds and dispersed through financial pipelines to where benefactors think it could be profitable (whether for their company, their personal beliefs or the whole of humanity).

And here's the rub:

Corporate philanthropy and funding buys and even exceeds the reach of government and is the first human invention to have a global impact pertaining to the direction of mankind's mental evolution. The right to control billions of dollars allows a human individual or small groups of trustees to influence what grows on earth and what doesn't; what people find important and what not. Grants determine who will rule, who will learn and from whom we learn. Corporate sponsors determine what people watch on TV, what they read about in magazines, what they believe in and strive for. Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, MTV Awards, Oscars; they're not about human splendor. They're all investments by industry, directing money streams to most profitable areas (whether monetary or idealistic).

The submission of large sums of money causes the market to respond and subsequently the assets of projects that have not been addressed to diminish. Giving to someone equals taking away from someone else. On top of that, the people that want to be eligible for corporate grants have to comply with standards; mission statements, well-defined target groups and most of all objectives. In the modern world it is virtually impossible to go wherever God will lead because corporate philanthropy is turning the world into a big gleaming image of herself.

The diversity of mind is as great as the diversity of life, and the mental sphere as intricate as the biosphere. Imposing the design of one man's worldview on the evolution of mankind is like making a plasticized replica of Da Vinci's Last Supper. But the mental sphere is not a painting on the wall; it's the world we live in. We think we are so smart but in fact we have entered an era in which the human mind is turning into a wasteland. Our heads are libraries full of inapplicable trivia; knowledge that has no bearing on our survival, happiness or social health. The once lush and living mental world of man is turning into a desolation in the name of progress and philanthropy; an abomination with the appearance of an angel of light.

If someone is not an anointed one, he is not able or supposed to determine who gets to drink and who doesn't. Someone who is not in tune with the Voice of the universe and acts as if he is a sovereign acts by the spirit of antichrist, which is the spirit of corporate philanthropy and funding, with roots in determinism and finally and most fundamentally, the number sequence. In short, money cannot cure the problem of money.

The Way of Oil, which is Christ, is about conducting the will of the Creator, not by dispersing the right to live at human will. It is a mental exercise, not a financial one. The currency of La Vita Olea is not gold but freedom from a system that depends on the approval of men. World peace will come from something that money cannot buy, since money, like numbers, can never exceed the realm of approximation. Give to Bill Gates what belongs to Bill Gates; the army of Christ is not an army of swords and certainly not an army of wallets.