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I had a dream last night. I've, I've been up since maybe 11. It's, it's about 230 in the morning now. And um a lot of times it's difficult for me to get into more productive things because my mind is operating in a space, my mind and heart where I feel like I have to step down maybe 10 levels to get to the point where I can communicate with others. And that's certainly the case with this book that I'm writing right now, which, which I have found to be very difficult to write this book. Uh because there are things that are so familiar to me that it's, it's actually quite, I don't know if painful or frustrating or appropriate words, but maybe both um to step down to that level of mechanical detail that's required to convey these things to other people. It's, it's almost like you've spent your whole life becoming a champion marathon runner um and done all the work to get to that level of athleticism which, which required overcoming all kinds of barriers and obstacles that were very difficult and very unpleasant. And then you have to circle back and set all that aside, um to share what you, what you learned very, very, very early on. But anyway, it's necessary I get it. Um But that step down is not , not actually what I wanted to talk about. One of the things that have to be stepped down from is an awareness of a greater depth of intensity that exists in reality. So specifically, uh last night I woke up earlier than I, I typically do. That's an understatement because uh I had this, this terrible dream and there's a gradation of dreams in, in terms of the, the slider between what I call it a cheeseburger dream, which is like when you have a cheeseburger for dinner and you have a dream. Um If you eat a big meal or something, it tends to increase the likelihood of dreaming, I think. Anyway, I heard that somewhere but normal dreams are just cheeseburger dreams and there's weird things happening and it, it doesn't mean anything. And then there's a slider where more and more of that dream becomes something that has meaning that goes deeper that that has some value in your life, whether it's imparting information about the past, present or future about yourself or others, whatever. So, uh this one was closer to cheeseburger than most of the dreams I have. And that's a really good thing because that slider can go all the way up to the point where you have dreams that are more real than reality. And that's an extremely intense thing. It's a, it's an incredible burden because it condenses experiences that would take many lifetimes to accumulate into a night. That's the potential of that slider. It goes up to that. And I could say a lot about that, but we'll just keep cruising here. So, but in the stream, in the stream, uh, a friend of my wife's who is the kind of person that, that any normal person who knew her would say, oh, she's a good person. Um She, she had something to do with being in charge of a bunch of Children caring for a bunch of Children. There were her own kids and there were other kids there too. And I saw and felt as I was in the dream and I was there watching. So she knew I was there and it was just sort of the normal course of events. But I had this supernatural ability to also feel what was happening. And I felt as she was exposed to item after item of what uh I have been shown exists as far as things that, that people would rather not know about. You could call that darkness. So as those things ticked off, I just saw her buckle just like you'd imagine a submarine that goes too far down into the sea and the pressure just gets it. And she, she just, she just completely emotionally collapsed. So these kids had to be helped and then, and I'm just washing through a bunch of details here. But at some point, we were in this house and the, the, the kids were in a place that was more central to the house and I was closer to the door and I was dealing with these things that had made the lady buckle and all of a sudden this guy comes in up to the door. I saw it happening as if it was in slow motion. But he was a, he was a big guy and he, have you seen these guys who were, they're freakishly strong, but they're thick too. They're like, they're just really, and they're, they're really tall. I'm 62. This, this guy was probably 64 or something. But just this lumbering giant of a guy, the kind of guy that, that if you know anything about hand to hand combat and you're the kind of person that's always sizing people up, you know, ready to take them down if you have to. Um, you think , man, I hope I don't have to fight this guy. But besides his physical stature, this guy just had a seething psychopathy about him. That's the only way I could describe it. The darkness that was coming off of this guy was palpable in the blankness of his expression. Somehow I just knew he was one of these people who were switched off. What do I mean by that? Well, let me see if I can characterize this on the fly when it comes to, to bad people. You've got the useful idiots who don't realize that they're harming people. You've got, and those folks are really dangerous because they don't have the check of normal. Then they think they're normal human beings and, and they are for all intents and purposes because of human nature. But they think that they are as most people believe normal people to be, which is this average model of a good person. That's not how normal people are, but that's what people think. They think they're like that. And meanwhile, they're causing enormous harm. So these are the people that like vote for property tax increases and they're like, oh, well, we need, we need another um community center and it's for the kids, the high school needs another track, whatever and they vote for property tax increases. That's a great example. Um on the, on the minor side to highlight this idea that they think it's good. They think it's minor, it's actually extremely harmful. So outsized negative consequences that you think are actually benign or positive things. Those people are really dangerous. But there are two other classes of people and one of them is what you think of when you think of an evil person, this is someone who actually rejoices in harming other people. A sadist. Um Those people are actually really rare, turns out compared to the other two groups. It's a minority of folks, you really have to be bad to feel that way. And the funny thing about them is ID of the three groups though, that's the person I'd most like to encounter. You know, why it's no mystery. They are very obvious and they're actually pretty easy to deal with because of that. It's, uh, you know, if, if someone's doing tremendous obvious harm and you react to that in appropriate ways, no one's gonna get on your case. That first group, which is by far the most nor numerous, if you know what's up and you handle those people appropriately, everyone thinks that you're an extremist or radical or you're overreacting. Anyway, the middle group is this lumbering fellow. These are people who, well, they're psychopathic. They have no empathy whatsoever. So, a sadist knows he's hurting people and he likes it. Right. But a psychopath, there's no registration of the, the pain, right? It's like, um, cops talk about the difficulty of handling people that are high on fentaNYL because they don't feel the pain. They just keep coming at you. So they have to unload a whole magazine and somebody to drop them because they just don't stop or other drugs too. There's a couple of drugs that are like that and um it's like that because they just don't feel it. And so they're capable of doing terrible things, terrible things and they just don't stop. So there have been some movies with characters like that, uh, several of which I actually haven't seen, so I won't even call them out because I don't know for sure. But you could probably think of some TV shows or, or something, but these people are real, they really exist and what's happening in the end times is that you're gonna see all, all three types more. The first type are already all over the place and they, they are constant in humanity. Um But you'll notice them more because the end times brings about more plainness and consequences. And so anyone who's paying attention is gonna see these people and come to a better realization of the harm they cause and that causes quite a rift because if you know, you're gonna do something about it and then, you know , you get in trouble for saying things you're not allowed to say and, and so on the uh the evil people, the outright evil people, they'll become more numerous and so will that middle group. And so that's um that's interesting. Um But I, but I wanna invert this because that's nice and depressing. So the pos the positive thing is um yeah, and there's a reason I didn't go back to sleep, right? It, it's interesting because life, our modern life in the first world acts very much like food does. So the analogy here is modern life masks, the malevolence of reality. The same way, the food masks, the emptiness of the flesh, I guess. Which you, you'll notice if you fast, I've mentioned this before. But when you go to break a fast, the, it, it's almost like you're pulling the curtains back. When you stop eating, you pull the curtains back and how you feel that emptiness. It's, it is how it is, it is how it is and, and then that becomes really obvious when you eat again and it doesn't just magically disappear. You don't go directly from willful numbness to open curtains, to willful numbness again. It takes time for that to, to wear off or wear back in. I don't know how to say that. I don't know. And maybe all this sounds particularly crazy but it is true. Um So life is like that and like that lady in the dream, normal life does not have the tools to cope with this. It's not even close, it's not even close. And so the Lord is leading people through these experiences to put them in a situation where they can sink or swim. They're basically just thrown in the deep end without any lessons. And then if they learn to swim, they'll have they have the ability to go and teach others before they need to know how because those people will not learn to swim if they're thrown in the deep end without lessons. But anyway, let's, let's do what I said we were gonna do and invert this lumbering dark seething darkness guy. Um So those kinds of people are really dangerous because they're switched off. They don't have any empathy whatsoever. And whereas their normal checks on normal people, which can be subverted and they are in the other two groups, this person is just in the absence of that check. And so they're ungoverned in what they're willing to do to harm people. They're unpredictable in that way. It, it's, it's, it's really something, I mean, it's, it's, it's the pinnacle of chaos cause it's complete, the an overtly evil person will use their intelligence to maximize that. And I said they're easier to deal with. You can predict what they're going to do that. Middle persons chaotic that it's just not uh predictable. And that's one thing that makes it so difficult now inverting this. Let's talk about courage . I have so much to say about it. This is a book topic but just very briefly, I want to just take out a little piece of that and share it. So some people define courage is what you're willing to do in spite of being scared. And it's an OK definition. But I don't like it. It's not specific enough. It's like, I really don't like the definition that the world uses for risk. It's a weak definition, meaning it's not just sort of a qualification on the word and definition. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a formulation of the lack of power in how we think about that word. Risk is not a negative thing. It's a completely neutral thing. There are two components in risk. The opposite of risk is not opportunity, opportunity is a component of risk. So risk is comprised of opportunity and danger. And it's the ratio of those things that determines whether a decision is good or not, not the presence or absence of risk. That's really important to understand. If you want to start to unlock ideas about complexity that the world doesn't understand. I had hopes of writing several books about that. I think I have maybe four books partially written on that topic. I spent a lot of time thinking about it over the years . Um And I was, I was planning on launching that as a, as a second track of my academic career uh when I was canceled for my blog. So, um yeah, so that's not gonna happen at this point as far as I know anyway. So risk is a word that, that we don't define very well, just like courage. So if you use the definition of courage as what you're willing to do, even though you're scared, that's, that's very weak and you rob yourself of the power of that word because that might be an introductory step into courage. It's certainly something worthy of working on and it's a, a valiant thing to do what you believe is right? Even if you're scared, but there is a level of courage where that ambiguous sense of the word is no longer good enough. And that word is fearless or a word to describe that subset of courage is, is fearlessness. So to be fearless is to be without fear, right? Phd. Retained. So, but how do you arrive at a state of being without fear? So let's talk about two ways. Most parents have experienced a fearless toddler where their child, at least one child has had a phase where they didn't seem to have any fear or at least in some situations. So like a kid running full speed off a dining room table and jumping into the air while the parent runs full speed to catch them because otherwise they're gonna face plant and get stitches, right? Stuff like that. Most parents have experienced that kind of fearlessness. Well, what is that? That is what I would call uninformed fearlessness. It's a fearlessness that comes from ignorance. Is that courageous? It's not, it's possible to seem like you're courageous when in reality, you're just dumb, right? And frankly, that's probably what most of what we register as courage is. It's just stupidity in disguise, right? And it might be useful. Most military courage is stupidity in disguise. It's people who have been brainwashed to not think about the consequences of their actions. And I'm not saying this lightly or without reasons. So I'll give you an example when you're in basic training, they put you through this bayonet training and I'll give you two examples one. When you're doing bayonet training, they have dummies that look like people and all day long, you stab them with the bayonet. What's the purpose of this? It's to bypass, it's to train your brain to bypass the normal check on human behavior where you'd be thinking about what it means to stab a person to death. And then, um with the marksmanship training, you don't shoot bull's eye targets, you shoot human silhouettes and you don't even think about it because all day long, for days and days and days you're popping these silhouettes and those are the targets and you get rewarded for knocking them down . You see how that works. So there's, there's no emphasis on the consequence of what you're doing. And all the training steers you away from thinking about it. And it's understandable. If you're a soldier, you get paid to do what you're told, not to think about it. And you just need to get sent in and do what you're told to do, right? That makes sense. Not from a moral perspective, but just functional. It makes sense. That's what you're there for. Now, let's talk about another kind of fearlessness that's informed fearlessness. And sometimes you get this in the military as well. And these are the, the stories that really affect you. But this fearlessness can be found in, in any domain. This is one of many lessons that we need to learn is that this fearlessness, real courage can be expressed in any situation at any time. And uh if you, if you make your life's purpose to understand and do what Jesus would in your place, you will find yourself being like this all the time. You will discover how you, how, what it means to be like this in every situation. You know, that's a crazy thought. So what does it mean to be informed? Uh fearless dash informed, that kind of fearlessness, informed fearlessness . What does that mean? It means, you know, the cost of what you're doing and you do it anyway and you do it without fear. No. So when, when a lumbering giant pushes into a house with people that you care about and you know what he's going to do and you have no weapon, the response to that has to be informed , fearlessness. That's the only effective solution to that problem. Um In the world today, I told you in the end times you're gonna see more of this. I heard a story about a relatively distant no pun intended, a relatively distant family member. Um And my mom was telling me the story of, of uh a gal who's roughly my age and has little kids and she's at a restaurant and some cree came and tried to steal her son and this is happening frequently these days, right? And I just saw a news article about this very thing not too long ago. It might have been yesterday. So what do you do when some person tries to kidnap your kid and you're just out and about not expecting it. Does it matter if that person is bigger than you or menacing looking or potentially unrestrained in terms of what they're willing to do? Well, that's kind of all the more reason to go ballistic, right. So what's the point of all of this , the end times it changes people and it also reveals the differences that were already there but quite hidden. So much of what we think is positive human behavior is actually just the result of strong external inhibitions of bad behavior against bad behavior, strong external inhibitions against bad behavior as that is taken away. And we've seen it taken away in very tangible ways, but that will continue to get worse as it's taken away. You're going to see how people really are to a much fuller extent and it's not good and people will change for the worse. What does this mean? It means you have to change for the better. You have to be a stronger person, you have to search for and find the meaning that justifies existence in spite of the greater quantities of darkness that will be revealed to you. The good news is it exists. The bad news is you don't have it yet. Like so many things in the end times, there's two ways, there are two ways that this rolls out. The one quality is that it happens all of a sudden. The other quality is that it happens a little by little over time. And so in all of these things, there's there is an uneven experience across people and across situations in time. So some people like my distant relative are going to come face to face with this sooner rather than later. And maybe you will too. And for others, it will just be the slow burn of societal values down to ashes and they'll see it with time. But it behooves everyone to respond early to the signals that are already sufficient, that suggest that it's necessary and to become the kind of person that has informed fearlessness that you are willing to do whatever righteousness requires in spite of any downside.