Evangelizing the Western Mindset - Part 13 — Winkie Pratney

Lord Jesus, we thank you again for the opportunity we've had in this series to study your Word and to look at the world around us in view of ministering to it. Help us, we pray, to maximize our time here in this session and give us a picture of our world that will create a compassion in our lives to love people the way you love them in Jesus' name, Amen.

The New Consciousness and Psychic Technology

I come now to a study of what we call the new consciousness. I've given it the name psychic technology, just a word to sum up this need. Out of all of the contemporary writers of our time, I don't know anybody who has seen this with clearer insight than C .S. Lewis.

In his science fiction trilogy, the third one, called That Hideous Strength, has to be one of the most brilliant books. You read a book on prophecy written by Christians, it usually involves the beast and stamping on the hands and various other things.

But Lewis probably summed up, without using biblical imagery, more what is going on in your time and mine than any other writer I can think of, secular or Christian. That Hideous Strength is set here in England in a little village where a group of people called N .I .C .E., who are anything but N .I .C .E., the police figure there is a militant lesbian.

The instructions that are given from this are given from a disembodied head, a person who speaks, who is being kept alive by a machine. In other words, the head is kept alive by a machine, but the voice that is coming out of the disembodied head does not belong to the person who originally owned the head.

Now in one gruesome symbol like that, he talks about the command given to this kind of world will be something supernatural, supported by technology. You see that? The voice speaking out actually is a demonic voice, it belongs not to the person who originally owned the head, and the technology is keeping that head alive.

That's his image of the beast. Now what an incredible picture that is, it's much heavier than some stomping around guy with black robes on pointing fingers at people. And the quote that really impressed me was this one.

The soul hath gone out of the wood and the water, for that hideous strength confronts us and it is as the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven. You see that in the old days when it talks about the building of the tower, and I analyzed that in Devil Take the Youngest, in this new book, the study on the war on childhood has its own family tree, and Nimrod and Semiramis and Tammuz in those early days were the first anti-Christian kingdom and the first anti-Christian pattern.

When they built that tower of Babel, it was not a Mickey Mouse attempt by neo-primitives to build a ladder that would go up into heaven, they weren't that stupid. It was an astrological construct, the tower was designed the same way as people build pyramids to focus psychic energy.

It was designed as a combination of mathematics and astrology and occult sciences in an attempt to work out how God put the universe together. And it was actually an occult construct, you know how pentagrams are drawn and stuff like that as an energy-focused center for spiritual powers?

The tower of Nimrod was the greatest attempt by people who profoundly understood that spiritual powers rule the physical world to find out how God put the universe together. Our equivalent today would be an occult person studying astrophysics to find out the secrets of matter and energy, because if you can manipulate matter and energy on another level, then you can rule the universe.

And it was so dangerous that the scripture says God personally intervened in human history. And Lewis, with that incredible insight, that hideous strength, confronts us again. We are again visiting, we are in the time when the tower is being built again to try and crack the secrets of the universe outside of biblical worldview and rulership of God.

Revelation, Technology, and the Nations

I want to briefly mention a man by the name of Arthur C. Custance. Arthur C. Custance is an anthropologist and a Christian scholar, he has a doctorate in anthropology, he has degrees in languages, he's a very, very sharp man.

He's Canadian, Custance, and he did a series of volumes called The Doorways Papers, a result of some 27 odd years of research. To read Custance is very refreshing, it's like hitting somebody like Schaeffer or Lewis, it's a whole new chain of thinking you never thought before.

He's a very original writer and thinker. The Doorways Papers were published by Zondervan in the United States, and one of the first books that was done was one called Noah's Three Sons. Noah's Three Sons is a study of human history and anthropology from a Christian perspective, and an excellent, excellent book, the best book I've ever seen by a Christian on anthropology.

In other words, how did our races get here and the development of them? He had a slightly unfair advantage in that he had a record of the early distribution of the races from biblical times, and with his knowledge of Middle East languages and study of anthropology, he put the giant jigsaw puzzle together.

Where did everybody come from? That kind of thing. Still shrouded in mystery, but he came up with an analysis I'll give you here. He believes that Noah's Three Sons were each given a major contribution to make to human history, and that they always appear in this order, and there's a reason.

To the sons of Shem were given the task of revelation, and that is why the three major religious systems in the world today are all Shemitic in origin, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. To the sons of Ham, which are broader than just the black peoples of the earth, he believes that the Hematic peoples were the genetically most diverse and the most powerful in their genetic distribution, and that many of the so-called colored peoples of the earth are actually Hematic in origin, and that God allowed the Hematic peoples to go to these hairy areas that were almost impossible to colonize and to master their environments.

In other words, they went to wastelands like the Eskimos, and they took over, taking a barren almost nothing there, and making a whole living environment. They went into tropical rainforests, and they used what was there, and that their great strength was technology, the practical solution of life problems.

And that the third major stream, which is called the Gentile nations in Scripture, the Japhetic nations, Japheth or Japheth, that their great strength was illumination, and that here we have the Indian civilization, we have Greek civilization, we have the Western world's great strength today.

That these three streams can be traced in history, and that whenever one stream crossed another stream, it resulted in an explosion of creativity and all kinds of things. We gave this earlier in an earlier study on the divine order in which to learn.

Revelation, God speaks, practical technology, practical service, you do it. Illumination, He explains it, maybe. Remember that? There was an order. Now what Customs points out is that if these two streams combine, you get something of tremendous power.

Revelation and illumination combining give you theology, which is the illumination of revelation, with all the implications of that. If illumination and technology combine, you have science. Understand that science is different from technology.

It's quite possible for a scientist to be able to explain to you a combustion engine to give you the analysis of the fuel used, but not be able to drive a car or fix it. They're two different things. Technology deals with practical application.

Science is the theoretical study of those things. And then, if we were to look at the Western world, and this is the mindset we're dealing with particularly, our great strength, even in our technologies, is illumination.

That's our inheritance. From Indian, from Greek roots, our big thing is being able to clarify, categorize, communicate, transmit information, you know, all this stuff. What we are really low on are these other two things.

The practical application of those things and revelation. So the third and the missing stream from these two is if you took revelation and technology and married them together. And the hunger in our time, among people especially, whose whole thing has been facts, information, data, transmission, all this, is these two things combined.

The occult equivalent of these two we've called psychic technology. The marriage of the revelation or the idea of the supernatural with the technological. But in this case, demonic revelation with scientism instead of just science.

There is a Christian equivalent to this. Can you give me the name of any person who was brought up in a culture very much like ours in which technology and the occult went hand in hand and that this person not only survived in that culture, was promoted to a very high level of leadership within that culture while retaining his commitment to the living God?

Daniel is a classic example. And when we see Daniel's life, we see the biblical original from which psychic technology is a clone. He is a man of great revelation. He's a man who understands the dreams that nobody else can understand.

He is also very, very practically a man who is able, so politically neutral, he's able to survive three different governments in exactly the same position in each. When the last government kills the entire previous government and retains him in exactly the same position to administer in the new government.

Now that is called political neutrality. Matter of fact, an example in recent times would be Wernher von Braun, the head of the German rocket program, who when America finally overran the German program, Wernher von Braun wasn't sent off to war trial to be executed for the V1s that dropped on London.

He was borrowed and put straight into the program to help develop rockets for the Western world because he was too valuable to lose. You see that? Now that, the person who is able to work with both technology and revelation, who understands the practical thing.

When I say technology, don't think of gadgets. Don't just think of gadgets. Think of Bill Garthard for instance. That's technology. The practical application into life. There's actually three different kinds of wisdom in the scripture.

Three different words for wisdom. This word, this is the word Sophia, from which we get sophisticate. It's the wisdom of the big picture. We call it absolutes of wonder wisdom. It's a Francis Schaeffer type.

The get back out of the world, take the big long look at it. This wisdom here is called phronesis and it is translated usually prudence. That's Bill Garthard type stuff. What to seek, what to avoid. The consequences if you do this, how to forgive, how to do those things.

The last one here is called sunesis and if you changed that U to a Y, because they don't have a Y in Greek, what do you got? And put a TH in there. Synthesis, that's the wisdom of, that puts things together, that goes wow, I get it.

This one links with that. That's what we're strong on, synthesis stuff. What we're not strong on is phronesis and Sophia. So we'd say the ministry that can touch young people's lives today is strong and the practical solution to life problems, there are answers and revelation, the big picture.

I think John Wimber is particularly effective because he's a man who comes from this thing, this thing here, the illumination thing. He's obviously an aware man, an educated man, but he's a man also who is encouraging people to move out into the supernatural, see?

And is very practical about it, it's not a mystical thing. It's like there's facts, there's analysis of this, that and the other thing. Do this, try, you know, it's a very pragmatic approach to healing.

It's not the healing line and, you know, now let your faith loose and God has called me and nobody else in the universe to do this, do you see that? Whoever puts these together will name the age. I want you to get a vision of what a ministry to young people that would touch the 80s particularly is like, it's those two things.

Kids are hungry for that now. I'll show you now, very quickly, how this arrived in the culture and we'll buzz back of what we've already touched on very, very fast and I can't take too much time on this, but there are four fundamental needs.

Love, Wisdom, Power, and Worship

The Bible lists these for us, love, wisdom, power and worship. There are others, of course, you can probably think of. These are four fundamental ones though, they're very, very important ones. The first two are actually the conditions of happiness.

In order for there to be peace or for there to be unity or to be harmony or agreement, can two walk together except they be agreed? Oh, I hate this, that thing, there are two fundamental conditions. We call this one, sad we have to use a negative word, unselfishness, in order for people to agree together, to have true unity, true peace, they must give up their self-centeredness.

There can be no lasting peace or unity or agreement or harmony until selfishness is dealt with. Every major thinker from Buddha to Marx, everybody understood, selfishness is a problem, if you want to bring people together, you've got to get rid of it somehow.

Secondly, there must be understanding. If you are going to agree or have harmony, you must have a common source of understanding. The knowledge you have must be both true and valuable. You can agree that you could fly, but if you can't and you jump out of the top of a very high building, it will shatter your illusions.

Those are the two conditions of happiness, without those there will be no peace. There is no peace to the wicked, God says, there is no peace at all. So those are very important. The world is on a search for love and for wisdom.

We want answers and we want somebody to care for us and watch over us and that whole thing. And so the Scriptures many, many times, this is the great command, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbors and yourself on these hands, all of the Law and the Prophets.

And if you love God, what is the principal thing you are to seek? Wisdom is the principal thing, God says. With all you are getting, get understanding. Once you love God, then seek after wisdom, that's another name for Christ, the head of the church.

So those two are important. Third one, power. We need a source of energy outside of ourselves. No man is an island, John Donne said, and that's absolutely true. You look at us, how are we sustained? We are kept alive by chemical energy.

We eat food, it's transformed by our biological systems into energy for us. And how does that food get there? There's a complex chain in the world, it's fed by a nuclear furnace up there. Nobody is truly independent.

If you got truly independent, you'd be dead. You see that? You're all dependent. We draw on outside sources to keep us alive. And it's just as true in the supernatural world as it is in the biological world.

Man was never meant to live alone. We need a source of power then, not only internationally. You want to make, how many would like to make a billion dollars, for biblical purposes of course, then come up with a new source of energy.

Come up with something that's, oh, okay, come up with a new source of energy and power that nobody has explored before. And the final one is this one, worship. And that is, we must give ourselves to something bigger than ourselves.

Man was made like that. Many scriptures on this, we won't have time to go into these in detail. I've been working 15 years on a book called Dark Wave, Bright Star, that takes these areas and amplifies them up a little bit.

Counterfeit Needs in the 1960s

Now in the 60s, these things were counterfeited to a whole generation. What we've got here are needs. These are fundamental needs. You cannot live without these needs being met. In the 1960s, those needs were substituted.

Can you give me some alternatives? There's more than one, but we'll take just some simple ones. Can you give me a counterfeit love? Instead of this security, what was substituted? We'll take our 60s, our radical 60s again.

What was given as love in the 1960s? So much so that love became equated with this. Sex. Love equals sex. Elizabeth Mobley, a psychiatrist here in Cambridge, has done an interesting little book called Homosexuality, A New Ethic, and in it she deals with one whole untouched area in the Christian church.

How do you minister to gay people in a positive way, not just prophetically speak up against the sin of sodomy? And the thing she brings out, which I think is very, very powerful, is that people who are sodomites or lesbians, or use gay if you want to use the word, but it's not a good word because it's not really true, suffer from a lack of same-sex love.

In other words, it's not just an aversion to opposite sex, it is a lack of love from somebody from the same sex. A boy who has a distant dad or a non-existent dad or a dad who split when he was two or three years old grows up with a great hunger for a father's love, same-sex love, a man's love for a man.

And without that there, he becomes an orphan, a psychological orphan, and goes through exactly the same kind of hurts that if my little boy, who was seven, lost his daddy now, all these things would happen.

He would feel hurt, he would feel grieved, he would feel angry, he would go through some real hard changes, whether he was a Christian or not, you see there? And that hunger for love has been equated with sex, see that?

So that to the kid who's been damaged by a broken family relationship, and I've never met one yet in all the ministry I've had with people who are sodomites or lesbians who have not had that to be true, whether it happened before they were even old enough to understand or not, the same-sex love parent is gone, is missing, vanished, not there, absent physically or psychologically, which means that person has a real hunger to be loved by somebody of the same sex, only in this it was made sex, love equals sex.

So in other words, to meet the need, the person is looking for sexual relationships which do not meet that need, and then it gets worse, it gets partner after partner, that's true, just as true in the heterosexual world as it is in the gay world.

So in other words, ministering, let's just take that particular area, because I believe with David Wilkerson, one of the heaviest duty things God could do is to set a spiritual awakening among the gays, and have genuine friendship and genuine love divorced from that sexual and erotic content which the world has made, see, in other words, to be friends with somebody, you've got to sleep with them, which is baloney, married people know that, you can sleep with somebody and not be friends with them, you know that, you can have a big argument, see, so this love made into sex was so successful that to make love meant have sex with, but it's not the same thing at all.

And that is why the Christian seems to present to the gay world either one of two things, the gay says, we have to have this, we have to have this, we have these fundamental needs and this is the way we are, and the Christians say, no, no, no, you'll go to hell if you believe that.

But do you see the problem? What the church must speak out against is the eroticization of a need that is not the need. How do you deliver a person from a need? Should I deliver you of the need to eat?

You can't counsel a person out of a need, nor deliver them out of a need, and you can't marry off somebody, say, what you need, son, because you're gay, is to marry somebody, that'll cure your need, and it does not cure the need because it isn't the same sex.

What gay men need is to get saved from their sexual immorality, which in this case is sodomy, and to develop real friendships for Christians to really love them and care for them and provide that which they have missed.

One of the number one lesbian activists in our country, in New Zealand, was led to the Lord by a team of young people from the Agape Force, and two of the girls there poured their lives into this girl.

She's seven years old in the Lord now, and she is one of the most significant figures speaking against the gay and lesbian movement in the country. But you know what her great concern is? There is no ministry at all in the whole nation to gays or lesbians.

There are only Christians speaking prophetically and non-evangelistically. You want to see how much there is in the Bible on orphans? Because that's what they are, orphans. Do you understand that? Sex was made love.

It isn't. It's not. Sex does not meet the need for love. Second, what about wisdom? What was the 60's answer to wisdom? Drugs was one of them, and we put that one there, especially the hallucinogenics.

That was offered, remember Timothy Leary's time, a way to get into that upper story and experience without having to run it through the rational. There were other things. There was, TM was offered as one, Scientology was another one.

You could become clear and know all things, only the founder didn't know that the IRS was after him and they caught him, so he had a lapse of omniscience. Most of you are aware that drug taking and drug use is a characteristic of the last civilization.

It is the word pharmakia in Scripture and its original meaning, as a matter of fact, pharmakia, from which we get pharmacy, pharmakia, E-I, I always get this, E-I. From the Tendal New Testament of 1526 to the present day translations, almost no English version of the Bible has used the primary meaning of pharmakia.

They have preferred to use its tertiary and, as far as I'm concerned, least significant translation, sorcery, which is the real meaning of sorcery, to induce religious experiences through the use of drugs.

That's what it means. So, a most serious warning is repeated five times for us in the Scriptures. The use of drugs to induce religious experiences implied is a chief source of last day's deception and a fundamental disqualification from the kingdom of God.

Scriptures like Revelation 18, 21 -23, 9, 20 -21, 21, 7 -8, 22, 11 -50, I'm just reading them, you don't have to remind me, Galatians 5, 19 -21, are words like sorceries or sorcerer or witchcraft. If you substitute drug taker or drug pusher for those words, you'd understand how profound Bible links deception with the widespread use of drugs in the last days.

And I've got lists here of drug taking. Revelation 18, 23 I'll read. I'll call it pharmacolatry, the door to mystery, the initiation of the secret wisdom, the wisdom of the religion of modern man. Scripture says your merchants, the one who bought and sold, you understand that the drug business is worth more than all the top ten fortune companies combined.

You make more money from drugs than the top ten fortune companies combined, just in the US. We're talking about multiple billions of dollars. Any people that can afford to buy a $200 ,000, $300 ,000, $400 ,000 plane and let it crash because the guy just parachutes out with drugs strapped to his body and the plane goes on pilotless.

That's the way they're getting them in now. You can let a half a million dollar plane just crash into the thing just to dump your load. He's dumping a lot. Scripture says your merchants were the great men of the earth and by your use of drugs were all nations deceived.

It has been made possible by technology on a grand scale. See? Mass production. Taylor made drugs today. Just change it a little bit and even staying ahead of what's legal. New drug comes out, they haven't had a chance to say whether it's legal or not.

The time they say it's illegal, they change a little bit of the molecule and send it out again. See, that one still isn't illegal. Now we come to, next one, power. We have a lot of different contenders for the power thing here.

Counterfeit Power and Occult Energy

Counterfeit spiritual power. Many people in the 60s who felt threatened by powerful people took up the same thing to defend themselves. Some guy, he saw karate people, some martial arts, so he studied martial arts.

Elvis Presley's bodyguard, this guy that got saved and killed people with his bare hands, registered weapon type. People study the same thing in order to protect themselves. It was the occult power systems that were presented in the 60s.

Today, in the 80s, this thing has come through, the idea that in the universe, there is an energy or a force you can tap into. It will not only give you wisdom, it will give you power. To George Lucas, the force, you know what it is?

It is the life energies of each individual person who dies. If you die, your life energy joins up like a cell in an overmind, great cosmic overmind. Because it's good people and bad people, it's just one huge energy field up there.

You can tap into it for good or for evil. The dark side of the force can seduce you, or the good side. Completely amoral, it's this Tao thing again. The good is just as important as the bad. But it is an energy there.

Now, there is a tremendous amount of studies in the field of physics, as they begin to study the new ways the universe is put together. There is a tremendous amount of study trying to explain the discoveries they make that show that the world of physics around us is a spiritual world and interpret it in the light of Eastern thought forms.

There is a great need there for Christians now to go in and show the biblical reality behind that thing and not turn it over to all the guys who were meditating in the naval in the 70s. And now become the directors of the major laboratories.

Do you see what I'm talking about here? This is a study of the universe and the powers around it as being handed over to the occult in our time. The Dancing Wu-Lai Masters is one book on physics. Another one is called The Tao of Physics.

Eastern thought forms interpreting the new physics. I have one book, I didn't bring it down this morning. One book called The Trees of the Field Shall Clap Their Hands which is one person's study of the new physics in the notion of the incarnation, that God is alive in his world and he's upholding all of matter and reality.

I'm going to do some stuff on that too, but anyway. Worship. Last one. What would you pick for worship? Simple one. To give yourself away to something bigger than yourself, grander than yourself, that would draw out all the excitement.

What is the number one contender for worship? 60s, Live Aid. That really is. It's getting more and more like worship all the time. In the 50s they used to call them Pop Idols. That was a good word, Idols.

In the 60s Jimi Hendrix called it Electric Church. In the 70s, again an accurate description. In the 80s we have Bizarre and Apocalyptic and all kinds of other groups. But music, more particularly the rock and pop and soul, I'll say rock as a general descriptor there, and the 19 different kinds of rock there are, we'll all put under country rock, pop rock, gospel.

Music has become the replacement for worship in our time because in the scriptures it's allied very closely with worship. I love the C .S. Lewis image of Aslan singing and the world, the stars appearing as he sings his song and the stars come out.

Eastern Thought and the Loss of Moral Absolutes

All right. Giving you all of that to show you what happened. That's 60s. Remember the 60s that we talked about? All those replacements took place in the 60s. In the 70s a problem was had and here's the problem.

I don't know if I've got this in the notes. Were the 60s anti-materialistic or materialistic? It looked like anti-materialistic, didn't it? Kids dropped out and said, hey, keep your cars and stuff like that.

But were they really? No, not really. They still believed in a materialistic universe. They threw materialism away from their parents, but in their own minds it was still time and chance and matter and that's all there is.

No God, no heaven, no hell. If you're the devil and you wanted to rule the world, what kind of world would you want? A religious world or an irreligious world? Why religious? Because you want to be worshipped and irreligious people don't worship anything except themselves.

But you've got an awful problem. If you make them religious, who knows? The Jesus movement might take place. So it's a very dangerous thing. If you take a bunch of materialists and you want to make them religious so they worship you, you've got to do something in between to get them away from their materialistic mindset.

But you can't on the way. You may make awful mistakes. Some of them may get saved. So what you have to do is put in something there that is anti-materialistic and supernatural, but not Christian. And that's where the East came in.

Eastern thought forms were the transition in the 70s between the materialistic, rationalistic thing of the 60s and into the 80s, which is a very, very occult generation. What you have to do is eliminate moral absolutes from society.

You've got to get rid of that idea of absolute right and wrong. And the East proceeds by four premises. And you'll see these all over the place. The first one is there is no absolute anything. There is no one truth that measures all other truths.

Let me explain that. Remember the elephant we talked about? The blind man and the elephant? The idea in the East comes like this. If you said in the 70s, hey, you want to get into Jesus, they went, hmm, that's beautiful.

That's a great idea. I'm already into five other things, but that would be nice. The idea in the East comes like this, that all truth is just sort of part of one great grid. You know, these people are into Christian things.

These into Buddhism. These into Krishna. These into, see? But it's all part of the same reality. So what you're talking about, you're talking about Christianity and saying how exciting and how unique it is.

It really isn't. It's all just part of one great reality. You've got the elephant's trunk. Somebody else got the ear. So the idea came that there's no absolute anything. There's no absolute one God over everything.

And now see how well this fits in. What kind of world do we live in? A fun, secure world or a really scary world? Genuinely scary. What kind of thing have you got to avoid? People stirring up trouble.

Okay? So people who go around and say, there's only one thing and it's my way or this way, are really bothersome in this world. What you've got to do is say, hey, if you're into Christ, that's beautiful.

For you. I'm into something else and that's beautiful for me. That makes it very hard to witness. Because they accept everything you say. Smile, yes, wonderful, terrific. Are you going to get saved? No.

Why not? I thought you were excited. I was for you. Oh, it was much easier to witness the radicals in the 60s than this. No absolute truth in one person or one book. Second, reincarnation. That is a fundamental principle.

You can't find an Eastern thought form that doesn't have that as its base. Now what does that do? Well, what that does, is it takes away the fear of death. Death is one of those absolutes, life and death, that is very hard to avoid.

It is one of the things that if people think about long enough, they may get saved. But not with this. In reincarnation, everything is beautiful in its own way. Life just goes round. You miss it this time, it's okay, you'll come back and you can have another crack at it.

So what we're doing here, what we're looking at, I've got a, let me just mention a few names for you. Bridie Murphy, The Search for Bridie Murphy, the first book, which is a technical popular study on reincarnation.

A hypnotist regresses a woman further and further by the technique of hypnotic regression, takes her back, she's a little child now, she's four years old. Describe what you see. Starts talking about a birthday party.

Then he takes her further back. Now I'm taking you back, back to your mother's womb, now further. Silence. Total blankness. Then the woman's mouth opens up and she says, My name is Bridie Murphy. Begins to speak in an Irish accent.

They go check out in Ireland, a hundred years ago, there was a woman called Bridie Murphy that died, this woman speaking that same thing. People go, Oh shoot, it's true. I'll tell you what happened. You get the blank mind thing and demons with perfect recall of all that is there haul out, run their little videotapes again and you've got a whole generation buying a fundamental lie and the lie is, it is not appointed unto man once to die and after death a judgment.

Many, many times you come back. Isn't it funny that a beer commercial, you only go around once in life, should be biblical. Then we have Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and others. Study of life after life. The death, after death experiences.

Everybody seems to go through and they always show you the lovely tunnel that you go through and the bright light and stuff and they don't tell you that there's two different destinies and people come out that other end.

They always play up the lovely ones and play down the horrible ones. But you see, this has become a study. Death has become a study. It is the 20th century obscenity. It's the one thing you don't mention in polite company.

It's a sign. Death is the greatest kick of all. That's why they save it to last. It's a reincarnation. By the way, do you see any illustrations of reincarnation? You see it every single day on television because the actor goes out there and he gets killed and then there's a pause for the coke break which brings life and then he's back again in the next picture in a different, you know, here he is alive again.

Constant idea. I'm going to read you something that was written 1 ,700 years ago by a guy called Plotinus who was before Augustine. What does it matter when people are devoured only to return in some new form?

It comes to no more than the murder of a person in a play. The actor alters his makeup and he returns in a new role. This is to show us all intentions are but play. Death is nothing terrible. To die is just a taste of a little beforehand what old age has in store.

To go away earlier and come back sooner. Murder is death in all its guises. The reduction and sacking of cities. The destruction of the world, you could throw in if you like. All must be to us the very incident of a plot.

Costumes on and off, acted grief and lament. It doesn't matter if the world blows up. It's only a game. It's only a movie. Everything will come back again. See that? You've got to put that one in. I've got three minutes to finish.