Noah’s Ark Of Consciousness

“Man is now living in his most critical moment and it is a crisis of immense dimensions. Either he will die or a new man will be reborn…It is going to be a death and resurrection. Unless human consciousness changes totally man cannot survive. As he is right now he is already outdated. …During this period there will be every kind of destruction on Earth including natural catastrophes and man manufactured auto-suicidal efforts. In other words there will be floods which have never been known since the time of Noah, along with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and everything else that is possible through nature. The Earth cannot tolerate this type of mankind any longer. There will be wars which are bound to end in nuclear explosions, hence no ordinary Noah’s ark is going to save humanity. …The Holocaust is not going to be confined to certain places, it is going to be global so no escape will be possible. You can only escape within and that’s what I teach. I do not teach worship of God or any other ritual but only a scientific way of coming to your innermost core.” (OSHO (1983))

The mother of all travails is unavoidable. There will be famines, plagues, and global disasters, whether seers have used the gift of true providence to forewarn us of signs of the end times, or have conditioned us to make the end times happen. A tribulation is coming, whether it is the end of the world or the birth pangs of a new age. The year 2012 will come and soon be forgotten in as we advance deeper into a century of revolution and upheaval. The 2010s will pass into the Roaring 2020s that will see unprecedented stress brought to bear on human civilization and Earth’s ecology. There will be wars, global warming and unrest. By the 2020s there will be billions of young people expecting a better future, but they will be disenfranchised by their own excessive numbers. They will see the job market and the world’s resources collapse. The basics for happiness in life will be denied them. They will not enjoy a good education, or a roof over their head. They will be denied food, water and hope. The young will be prime targets for the harangues and hate mongering of not one but dozens of messianic Hitlers preaching an apocalyptic solution.

If only they could catch a ride on a Rapture cloud – if there were one. The more practical person might dig a survivalist’s ditch and wait out the tribulation to come, but escape may not be possible when the whole world is going to feel the pain of this multifaceted travail. If food runs out during a protracted global famine, the survivalists will be the first doomsday moles rooted out of their holes by the desperate who are rooting out the last of the hoarded supplies.

No one will escape.

You may choose to abandon the rising, flooding coastlines of California for a religiously pure and safe area like the desert town of Sedona, Arizona; but rather than drown from rising oceans, you may desiccate when the potable water in that New Age Mecca runs out.

The coming decades of the early 21st century could see all of us writhing under an Internet of history’s first global emergency. No region, no nation and no person on Earth will be exempt from the effects of another person’s misuse or overuse of the planet. The next 30 years will endure floods not seen in recorded history – if not directly from weather, then from rising coastlines.

Prophets foresee earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even many scientists predict natural disasters of a scope and magnitude never before encountered. It will be as if the earth were rebelling against a humanity that chooses to remain retarded while it waits for the saviors to fix them.

Nostradamus and other seers have predicted a plague of 70 wars across the world, triggered by the breakdown of water and food resources caused by rampant overpopulation. Many of these wars will end in nuclear explosions and the unleashing of biological and chemical-weapon plagues.

Attempts to escape may not only be futile but also result in a missed opportunity. A major theme promoted by more renegade redeemers – those mystics who do not toe the mainstream anti-life and pro-afterlife line of the Second Coming Syndrome – is that you cannot escape from yourself. No matter how high the Rapture carries you into the clouds, no matter how many Himalayan mountains you pull over your head to escape the disasters, the problem comes along for the ride.

You are the problem.

And you could be the answer.

The answer to averting the tribulations to come may arise out of each individual understanding and transcending the problem he or she has become.

Individual salvation requires something else entirely, a totally new vector. Whole some continue to wait for rescue in the form of a new ark of a New Jerusalem to mother-ship them out of harm’s way, there are visions that act like irritating flies dancing on the nose of such deliverance dreams, disturbing their reverie. These visions buzz with images of a travail from which there’s no escape. They say that the coming disasters will force all people to stand face to face with a heartbreaking and dream-breaking reality: No saints or saviors are coming to save us from ourselves.

We will have to become our own saviors.

One of the renegade mystics, Osho, believes the next Noah’s ark needed to save humanity is a Noah’s Ark of Consciousness. It is not a UFO mothership of nebulous construction built for one to wait out the seven years of tribulation behind a comet’s tail. It isn’t a cave city for survivalists. It is a hideaway so secret that you’d never guess how close it nudges against where you live even at this moment. It hides right behind the source of your existence.

This safe haven is a place that spiritual survivalists retreat to.

It is the ark of consciousness within each of us.

The pathway to this ark can be found by remaining silent and centered exactly in the middle of the cyclone of the coming times.

MEDITATION:
Therapy for Madhouse Earth

While watching the changing world outside and the movement of thoughts and emotions within, I become more aware of a presence that doesn’t change. It is impossible to define in words what this is, but I do know that it is always the same presence; that when it comes, it is everywhere and nowhere at once; that nothing I’m thinking or feeling can connect with it; that it is so still it doesn’t exist and so subtle that at times it is too alive to bear.

I remember first encountering this presence as a child. Then I lost touch with it. The losing was a gradual process called growing up. I experienced it as walling up. Gradually Pink Floyd’s bricks piled up around me, blocking out the limitless view of the innocent and unnamable wonder that a child feels by just being alive. I was taught to hold on to thoughts and possess emotional expectations; in short, I was given recipes for accepted adult behavior. I painfully learned to live in a world where beauty and the art of being alive are pushed lower and lower on life’s laundry list; I was taught to survive in a culture where cars, money, face-saving at all costs, and manipulation of others are the primary values. I had come into the world as a cosmos and it looked like I would leave the world as a spent commodity.

When it got too much, I got pushed to the edge of a nervous breakthrough. There were only two alternatives: rediscover what I had lost, or lose myself.

How can I tell you about this journey inward to find my self again, without tarnishing it with judgments, dialectics, words?

If I ever greet you beyond the veil of these words, we might find a way to share this mystery called meditation. I will not speak of it, I will sing it to you, dance it; we will hug meditation, we will silent meditation. Our sutras will be giggles. I’d rather not use words, but this is the Kali Yuga after all — an age that uses the least adequate media to express the deepest truths.

With that said, let’s stumble ahead in the darkness of print:

I do not yet know who I am but meditation allows me to often see how I am.

Through understanding the hows of my happiness-sadness-love-and-hate, I observe their rough-and-tumble within me with greater distance. Meditation helps me to watch the movement of my thoughts and emotions. I become more a spectator than a participant in stress, pain, and denial. Through meditation I have been able to uncover the root cause of all my misery: The fear of change, and lurking behind that, the ultimate fear — the fear of death. Meditation has helped me observe the mechanics of misery and fear.

There’s a Sufi metaphor about identification. Misery doesn’t come to us, we unconsciously seek it out and hold on to it, like flinging our arms around a pillar. As we squeeze tighter we yell, “Oh, if I only could be rid of this misery and pain!”

This misunderstanding is our choice. As American mystic Adi Da Samraj once remarked, we do misery, we do expectation.

Hell is not a place. We do it.

We do predictability.

We make prophecy work because we are so damned predictable. Caught in the cycles of time and unconsciousness, we have repeated again and again the behaviors that make it easy for the seers to prophesy us unto doomsday.

The crossroads in time where we find ourselves now demands a spiritual rebellion that can prevent us from doing an apocalypse of doom in all dimensions. The first decades of this new century require that a significant number of people get some distance from themselves to see how they tick.

There is a need for a global awareness of how, from the moment we emerge from the womb, we are programmed from birth onwards to imprint concepts that are totally divorced from our deepest natural understanding of life. Only when there are enough people ready to rebel against this ancient circle of programmed misery and predictability can it be broken.

The spiritual rebels will certainly be in the minority. Most of us are bound to avoid encountering the raw revelation that we actually love our misery and hold its pillar fast to our breasts while we wish and wail for a new age. In the coming decade, billions will discover that misery and fear is all they know. But unlike most people, the spiritual rebels will break out of their prison of conditioning and become the new humanity arising out of the rubble of the old.

The spiritual rebels will not pander to the death cults of current religious thought; they will live this life so fully that heaven will exist inside them, not somewhere in the afterworld. They will escape from their jail-keeper called God. And they will slip from the bonds of national identification to become citizens of the world.

Meditation is the method to uncover all the illusions that keep humanity in bondage. It is the only hope this planet has to avoid the collision course so many seers down the centuries have predicted for us. Every misunderstanding and distortion of truth that has blindly dragged us to the brink of the precipice will have to be jettisoned, if we are not to plunge over the edge at the end of this decade.

This is why the emergence of the new breed, Homo novus — the true strangers among us, is viewed with suspicion and fear. The priests or the politicians cannot control these people. They do not pray for happiness, they are happiness. In the midst of a suicidal world, their way of life exposes the death wish society must encounter and transcend if it is to survive.

The spiritual rebels are the soul and spirit of the new Golden Age. And meditation is their new science.

My own journey into meditation and spiritual rebellion began from a nasty experience I had as a seven year old, when I moved to a new school in a new neighborhood.

I was in love with the little girl sitting next to me in my second-grade class. When she was moved to another spot in the classroom, I was brokenhearted. The teacher, like many adults I knew then (and now), liked to hide her fears behind a façade of power. She looked as big as her fear, and when she demanded to know what was the matter with me, I didn’t speak in words but in pain, and sobbed into my hands. My expression of naked feeling elicited from kids and teacher alike an immediate wave of hostility and derision. For weeks after that event, I was treated with disgust and fear as some kind of thing.

During an atomic air raid drill for World War III — so common in the years following the Cuban Missile Crisis — I accidentally bumped into the largest kid in the class while groping in the dark classroom for my place to duck and cover myself.

His immediate reaction was to slug me in the stomach.

Crying, doubled over in agony, I asked him why he hit me. Still a kid and not yet completely formed into the proper masked and label-loving adult, he was struck by the blow of my existential question.

“I don’t know!” he blinked, bewildered. “It’s what dad told me to do. When you’re hit, hit back.”

That was my first hard lesson in programming.

It got worse. When he and a gang of kids would chase me off the playground every recess with tetherballs and stones, I had to run my little ass into a nearby storm drain trench. As I huddled there, I was forced to face the reality that people were neither sane nor loving; they only pretended to be. The children would forget about me and wander back to the swings and sandboxes, but I could never forget this heartbreaking truth, heartbreaking because it set me apart from people. It made me aware that I am alone.

But no bitter experience is without its sweetness. Crouching in the trench, chin buried in the pungent grass, with tearful, wide eyes gazing at dancing clouds in a silent sky, I also became aware that Nature did not — could not — reject me. It was more than a friend, it was a beloved. As I became aware of my aloneness, Nature accepted it. Was it.

After that I could not see fear in Nature, only innocence. There is no judgment in Nature’s stases and catastrophes. It is unnatural man, divided against the Self, who judges them. There is life, death, violence and peace flowing from animals, earth and plants. They don’t judge or feel divisions like we do. The rosebush doesn’t compare itself to the lotus and commit suicide. In fact, no animal except man commits suicide or indiscriminately slaughters its own kind. We compare, and throw our minds and hearts into the turmoil of division. This division becomes projected onto all of our relationships with other human beings and with the Earth. As we become more and more split off from our fellow humans and from the planet, we create all the conditions that draw us closer to death — personal and global.

The insights of my personal apocalypse made it hard for me to buy into all the ways people suppress the natural within and destroy the ecology of Earth with their fearful greed. A new and tender consciousness arose that at the time had no words. Looking back on it years later, I realized it was then I made the commitment that has forever sabotaged my efforts to embrace life as it is socially presented and commonly accepted. That is why I never succeeded in opera or fit with anyone’s projections and expectations.

I somehow understood in my child-mind that a truly natural, spiritual person would be as silent as that sky, as playful as those eddying clouds, as rich with the fragrance of wisdom as the grass cushioning my chin. A natural human being, like the grass, could not dictate or push his or her fragrance on others but would simply be unable to contain it.

In the intensity of that terrible moment of rejection, Nature showed me how to sniff out an authentic member of the genus Homo novus. These flowers in humanity’s manure field would possess the silence of Nature and an equanimity in the face of Nature’s two polar complementaries — destruction and creation. I would instinctively recognize these members of the new human race by their laughter and celebration uncaused, by the gleam of a second and consciously recognized childhood sparking in their eyes. I would know them if their silent gaze and presence were not disturbed by fame or infamy, riches or poverty, life or death. They would remain inwardly blissful, unaffected by life’s vagaries or any attempts by those outside of their silence to abuse and disturb them. The Homo novus would be happy in a palace or in the dirtiest holding cell. And if sadness on rare occasions came to their doors, they would watch it rather than indulge it, until sadness moved on.

I have spent the last sixteen years traveling around the world in search of such men and women. I have found them. They are my criterion for saying you and I are unnatural. They have also showed me — in their unique ways — that meditation, the science of self-observation, is the only medicine that can cure the insanity we have become and give us back a future.

I do not ask or expect you to believe me. In fact, there is no point in either believing or debunking what I’m saying without a sincere and intimate investigation on your own.

I am satisfied with the ongoing process of my own apocalypse. I have met a few members of the genus Homo novus and their fragrance is meditation.

The words meditation and medicine have the same ancient root. One heals the body, the other the soul. If we look from a more occidental angle, the words meditation and mechanic also have the same roots. If you can watch your entire mental-emotional engine without getting caught in its grinding gears, if you can see it as the dispassionate and watchful mechanic, you will then find ways to fix your engine. It will start working for you rather than disturb your ride through life.

I can thank the apocalypse of meditation for pushing me out of an operatic career. Nine months before I had my nervous breakthrough, I became interested in meditation as a way to relieve stress and refresh my body-mind. But I soon found out that meditation was more than a mere exercise in positive thinking or an exercise in creative visualizations to find new and improved love and abundant money and health. Taking twenty minutes a day to watch my breath turned my outward focus in. This turning in did more than slow the heartbeat and ward off high blood pressure of the upwardly mobile professional I had become. It reminded me of childhood’s timeless time when trees fall and nobody is there to hear, when flowers grow with nobody there to see, and feelings flow with nobody there to feel. Through watching the simple witnessing of life’s infinite movements I unearthed the pleasure in paradox.

I rediscovered moments when life became poetry again.

When roots of silence sink where I sit so still soaking earth softly. And deep silence dives in skies caught cavorting behind closed eyes.

Meditation started washing my looking with eternity’s twinkle. After a few months of practicing simple Zen exercises of watching the breath, I couldn’t understand why something so pleasurable and revitalizing wasn’t universally practiced. Then a moment came when the new awareness reached deeper into my unconscious and threw a shattering light on my illusions.

It can happen at any moment. Especially if you watch your breath, if you are still, waiting. Something trips the existential switch and the screen of your personal id soap operas blinks out. A void fills the void, wiggling through a brief crack in the noise of the mind. It is the apocalypse of truth breaking the sliding bolt that locks away all the lies from one’s sight. It is a thief in the night, stealth-like and silent, a wave, invisible, undermining one’s cliff of solid ego.

In one unguarded moment I became transparent. And though the guard of moments — the personality — instantly returned, I could not completely forget the void’s abiding and spacious sky of silence.

For me, this was and is the threshold of meditation. It is as much a death as a delight. Meditation’s techniques of self-observation showed me my thoughts were no more mine to possess than a wind racing through empty dreams.

At meditation’s first penetration, I became aware that this “John Hogue” was a fiction written by many hands — none of them my own. A name, a religion, a country, and finally a personality had been applied like bricks, imprisoning the authentic being my mother and father had brought into the world.

Early on, the label bricks were of soft and pliable mud, easy for a child to break free of, but between the ages of seven and fourteen, the bricks turned into unyielding stone. I had become my own memorial statue while still living.

The child seized these brick labels as greedily as he seized the tit. What else could he do? That child needed the grown-ups, and the grown-ups felt they needed to condition him for the coming life of lies and limitations. The child of silence became a gullible youth who listened to society’s learned hypocrites — the priests of impossible horizons — who, save for the noise of their roaring, have never encountered the things they taught: gods, heavens, and hells.

The youth became imprisoned in adulthood’s emotional and psychic castle. At the age of twenty-one, meditation’s taste of disidentification made John aware that his buddha had atrophied. The Enlightened One reduced to enlightened once. Fear had become his bedmate, denial, the sheets.

Like medicines, meditation can be bitter. Initially, it can give you worse pain than the disease itself. Cancer patients would like to escape the only therapies that might possibly save them, but if they chooses to fight for life, painful chemotherapy or radiation will be risked.

After abandoning an operatic career, I began taking risks. I again started asking all those questions children ask and adults avoid. Essential questions: Why am I unhappy? Why do I fear? Who am I?

At first I tried the usual New Age assortment of meditations that heightened psychic powers. After four years of this, I could see auras, read minds, etc. Still, the essential facticity of my being was hidden. While astral traveling I had many fascinating experiences, but they didn’t make me any more aware of who was zipping in and out of the astral realms. Who was seeing auras? Who indeed was opening his chakras? Who was reading minds? Who was this mystery that sometimes accurately saw the future?

Whether I am looking at a cup of coffee or seeing my past and future lives, how can any of these experiences be me?

Who, after all, is the watcher?

Frustration led me away from the psychic seeker-sucking game to an exploration of many Eastern techniques of classical meditation such as Yoga and Vipassana — which is Buddha’s technique of sitting watching the suchness of thoughts and emotions. I also had direct experiences with some new and radical seeds of Eastern meditation set to sprout in the West sometime in the next century.

Over the last decade, I have encountered what in my opinion were many charlatans and also a handful of authentic masters. An account of these spiritual examinations, meditation therapies and teachers would be too vast to describe here. A detailed account will be forthcoming in future books.

Here, on this web page, I can only touch on some of the radically new ideas about meditation that have been introduced in the latter half of this century. For instance, if you fly to the town of Poona, India, just 100 kilometers from the labyrinth city of Mumbai (Bombay), you will encounter the most striking examples of this. Nestled in the town that gave Tantra one of its greatest ancient centers, the birthplace of one of India’s most significant twentieth-century mystics, Meher Baba, is the Ashram (spiritual campus) that used to be known as Osho Commune International and currently goes by the name Osho Meditation Resort.

There you will find the disciples of the late Osho carrying on their master’s vision of providing a Club Meditation for the creation of the new humanity. It is a sixty-eight-acre resort of luscious gardens, black granite and marble buildings and pyramids, a strange contrast to the surrounding squalor of a bustling Third World city.

It has undergone many alterations since I first entered its gates back in 1980, when it was known as the Poona Ashram of the notorious sex guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I had gone there two years prior to my longer stay at the Rajneeshee Ranch in Oregon. While the later experiment allowed me the opportunity to sample social experiments in future living, the Poona Ashram offered me a taste of life at the frontiers of the Human Potential Movement.

In Nostradamus and the Millennium (1987), the first volume of my Nostradamus prophecy trilogy (the second and third volumes are Nostradamus, The New Revelations [1994] and Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies [1997]), I examined predictions of Nostradamus regarding the loose fellowship of therapists and meditation movements of the last fifty years known as the Human Potential Movement. Nostradamus pegged this movement as the source of tomorrow’s spiritual rebellion. I was determined to find out what it was all about. Frankly, when I did, it shocked me. Up until I became acquainted with these new therapy movements, I never knew that screaming, pillow beating, or openly exploring my sexuality in a therapy group could be the beginning of treading an authentic spiritual path. When I first heard about the ashram, I was told they practiced the most cathartic meditation technique in the movement. At first it was called Chaotic Meditation; then the name was changed to Dynamic Meditation. I was about to find out what it was, firsthand.

Osho is famous in meditation circles for his controversial claim that we moderns, particularly the Westernized variety, are the most restless and neurotic human who have ever existed. With enough forceful discipline, we may be able to keep our body still, but we cannot still our minds. Vipassana, Yoga, and all the rest of the 112 techniques from the East are made for simpler people of more innocent and less complex times.

Before sitting in silence can happen, the accumulation of stress, anger, and repression packed away behind modern people’s happy-face masks has to be creatively and safely expressed. Osho claimed to have a meditation technique that, if practiced all over the world every morning, could be used as a release valve for all the pent-up collective angers that periodically erupt in a binge of global slaughter — what I’ve coined as the will to catharsis.

The meditation has five sections and is done to especially composed music by the New Age composer Deuter as conceived by Osho. During the first part, of ten minutes duration, you breathe rapidly, chaotically and deeply through the nose. This is supposed to build up the energy that can help you release the flame of pent-up repressions.

Then, at the sound of a gong, the music changes into waves of sonic wildness. For the second ten minutes you are to undergo catharsis, release emotions, anger, gibberish, fear, rage, madness — whatever comes up. You are to dance it, shake it, scream it, sing it, but you are absolutely not allowed to hurt others in the hall.

The third gong brings on a ten-minute hop of heaven-hell. You stop releasing emotions [or stop undergoing catharsis] and reach your arms straight over your head and jump to the pulsing synthesizers and drums. Every time your feet hit the ground you yell Hoo! with all you’ve got, as if it meant life or death. This is a variation of a Sufi technique designed to bring your energies up out of your sex center and take them through the rest of your body.

At the last hop and Hoo! the pre-recorded voice of Osho yelling Stop! cuts the music like splitting a thunderbolt. You then freeze in place like a statue for fifteen minutes and watch within.

Finally, there is fifteen minutes of dancing and celebrating.

The first three sections are consciously constructed to completely exhaust you. In this way, Osho’s techniques are similar to those of George Gurdjieff and the meditation schools of central Asia who believe that man had deeper and deeper layers of energy — second winds, if you will — that first have to be expended before real meditation can happen. The more total your exhaustion, the deeper the plunge within your being.

Many mystics, past and present, say that only when one reaches a crisis can an authentic spiritual journey begin. A state of extreme urgency is a must. Totality is the ultimate credential. Only when the inner search becomes a life-and-death issue can the tension be brought to the breaking point and send you into an altered state of deep relaxation.

Dynamic Meditation uses the first three sections to prepare you for the state of dispassionate witnessing that is the final preparation for meditation. The rapid breathing brings up the repressed tensions; the catharsis stage then activates a good spiritual vomit; the hopping nearly exhausts you, bringing the body to the limit of its endurance, and then you can fall into an altered state — a meditator’s version of a runner’s high, so to speak.

My understanding of meditation techniques is that they relax you into witnessing. These techniques themselves, however, are not true meditation, nor are all those so-called spiritual experiences one has through being still and silent. Meditation is not an experience. Meditation is not a thing one does to get something, but it does seem that some preparation for meditation is needed. The silent witnessing of meditation only blossoms from the waiting, the allowing, the parking of the body-mind, the deep relaxation without a goal or expectations, because to have goals and expectations is to be tense.

Back in 1980 when Dynamic Meditation was first described to me, it was enough to stir a volcano of rage and fear underneath my spiritual façade. The night before doing my first Dynamic Mediation was one of the darkest in my life. I experienced the essence behind the terrible words of St. John’s prophecy about people trying to pull the mountains over themselves to escape facing the revelation of truth. That night moments passed like the peeling of skin. I tossed and turned, then ran to the bathroom and saw the puffy face and slit eyes of a man stunned by his own terror.

I never felt so stuck. I could not go back and I did not want to go forward into the unknown that a cathartic meditation would reveal. I writhed about in the damp fishing net of my bed covers in a tropical-fever night, cursing myself, Osho, meditation, and all the mystics that disturb people’s sleep.

I could sense that if I went too far with this meditation experiment I would reach a point when I could no longer return to that deep sleep. I tell you, reader: since my experience of that night I see a terrible revelation about everyone — we don’t want to wake up. We don’t want happiness, we don’t want real freedom because to attain it we must confront all that is false in us, chaining us down. To be a meditator is to be mother to the birth of our own inner child. The master or the meditation technique is the midwife. They can help, they can hold your hand, they can indicate what you have to do, but the pain of giving birth to yourself is encountered alone. No one else feels the contractions of your womb like you do.

When 6 a.m. came, I somehow managed to drag myself out under the wide, wall-less dome of the meditation hall. There I mingled with several hundred groggy meditators. We blew our noses and blindfolded ourselves, digging bare feet into the cold cement floor. All braced themselves for the first gong, which would strip the predawn air of its silence with Deuter’s apocalyptic muzak.

At the sound of the gong, the knotted rubber band of my pent-up terrors released its prop and off went my model-plane personality into the predawn darkness.

By the end of the third stage of dynamic, if I had any ambition for nirvana left, the hopping and hooing was squeezing it to the relaxing point. When the recorded blast of STOP! cut the sweaty air, I froze-fell to the cold floor. For fifteen minutes, I became a stillness floating on the waves of a gasping-for-breath — too tired to think, too cleaned by catharsis to be afraid.

What can I say to you about this heap of John Hogue lying on the cement floor? What words can convey the down-down-down, deeper-deeper-deeper he had become for those eternal minutes?

Clear, because nothing obstructs.
Soundless, because it has no end of depth.
No bottom for the sounding,
No surface for the sounder.
IT — looking without eyes and dying

without death.
A cloud of darkness, I gave my self in rains,
Letting fall showers of sorrow,
Until a burning sky of joy remains.

The delicate notes of the flute heralding the final stage of Dynamic Meditation brought the first awareness of that inner sky to me. Drained limbs made an effort to move, twitching like a fresh corpse. The music caressed more movements out of my still pool of exhaustion until I was able to lift my heavy, blindfolded head. At that moment, I was drowned in an explosion of white light as bracing as a cold mountain stream. The light took me up in its embrace. Where one exhausted man lay a moment before, there appeared a dancing fool.

In my veins fired life, dyeing the darkness in countless fire clouds. To dance was to touch gold with eyes and bathe the world with sight. By the end of the celebration music, and as the rising sun cut shafts of light through birdcalls and the tropical plants surrounding the hall, I had become the blue-viewing of sky.

Now when the world’s misery pours tears out of my eyes, they are not only of suffering or the grieving spawn of expectations and desires, they are the realization that sanity is possible. Humans suffer because they cannot completely return to an animal’s innocent state. I am one human who is convinced that all humans suffer life on Earth because to one degree or another they have sand chaffing their dreams. They hurt because they have the destiny — mostly ignored and repressed — to make within themselves a pearl called Homo novus, the New Humanity.

Prophecy indicates that time is running out for the birth of this new humanity. The birth has to happen this very moment through a spiritual rebellion against the past. Humankind is destined for a catharsis, a psychic breakdown that can also become a psychic breakthrough. The choice is ours.

***

Meditation can gain each of us access to a Noah’s Ark of Consciousness. If what I’ve confessed here about meditation resonates with you. If Osho’s eyes mirror a beckoning from the beyond to you, then, like me, you might try experimenting with some of his meditation techniques, not only Dynamic Meditation. Osho has many active and passive techniques specifically tailored for people living in our fast pace times. And these techniques will not make one an escapist. They simply help one live fully engaged in the world without being of the world and its troubles.

As I understand it, meditation is not religion. It is a technique to tune in and become more quiet inside, blissful, alert and undisturbed by the gathering storms on the horizon of humanity’s future. I would say that whatever your religion is now, be it theist, atheist, Eastern or Western, mainstream or pagan, meditation will bring to your religious experience deeper insight – revelation.

If you permit me, I can freely share with you information about and links to the meditations I use. Simply Contact Me.

I close with these insights foreseen a quarter-century ago by a prophet for a new humanity. He understood our dire times and what we each can do to turn the dark future before us into a golden future:

Just as death faces an individual, similarly death shows its dark face before the collective consciousness of an entire civilization. And that civilization’s collective mind becomes ready to go deep into the realms of religion and the unknown…This can repeat itself again; there is a complete possibility for it.

Osho (1971), Dimensions Beyond the Known

Never before was the search so acute, so intense, because never before was man in such an anguish as he is today. The search always comes out of anguish. Whenever there is great anguish, the anguish becomes a challenge, one has to search for something which is so meaningful that the anguish can be dissolved through it. When the darkness is very very deep, only then does one search for light.

And the darkness is really deep. This is one of the darkest ages: never before has man been in such a disturbed, confused chaos. Because all the old values have disappeared. Man is no more rooted in the past, there are no more any goals in the future, all utopias have failed. Man is utterly desperate now to know what to do and where to go.

In the past it has happened many times that a certain value became valueless, another value took its place, it was substituted. One religion died, another took its place. One idealism was found futile, another better vision, more golden, was immediately available. What has happened this time is that all the ideals have failed and there is no more any substitute. It is not that one value has failed and another has come into being: that is not much of a change. This time, value as such has failed and there is utter darkness, nowhere to go. This is the greatest challenge to human awakening. Hence I say, for the first time in history, the time is right for a great Buddhafield.

Osho (1978), Let Go!

A great, unheard-of experiment has to be done, on such a large scale that at least the most substantial part of humanity is touched by it—at least the soul of humanity, the center of humanity, can be awakened by it. On the periphery, the mediocre minds will go on sleeping—let them sleep—but at the center where intelligence exists a light can be kindled.

The time is ripe, the time has come for it. My whole work here consists in creating a Buddhafield, an energy-field where these eternal truths can be uttered again. It is a rare opportunity. Only once in a while, after centuries, does such an opportunity exist…don’t miss it!

Osho (1979), The Dhammapada: The Way of Buddha

YOUR COMMENTS…

DENISE

I don’t think my comment went through on your blog on the ” Noah’s ark of consciousness” I found the article very moving and beautiful expressed. I am actually a christian prophecy researcher explorer on my own but i really enjoy reading other views of prophecy, including the Mayan. I found your writing very beautiful, moving, sad and prophetic all flowing in at same time on my thoughts. The news media information on your guru back in the days did not show him in favorable light so I never really allowed myself to explore him in a prophetic sense till tonight. thanks for the article.

HOGUE

Thanks Denise for your lovely letter and for your openness and understanding. As you know, from the life of Christ, the mainstream “press” of his time and the Establishment too, shined an unfavorable light.

Such is the situation with those of great truth and enlightenment. Jesus was Crucified, Muhammad was poisoned as was Buddha. Zoroaster was stabbed. Socrates poisoned. Plythagoras burned alive with his disciples and the Sufi mystic al-Hillaj Mansour was cut to pieces bit by bit as he laughed. Osho was also killed by poisoning in jail. It took Muhammad seven years to die from poisonning. It took four years for the poison to take him. Such is the way of unconscious masses when faced with the flowering of individuals like these who are the awakening of our greatest potentials.

Do not read sadness in my words when I say this. I celebrate their light and understanding that passeth our understanding and our attempts to render pain.