The Marriage of Victims and Victimizers

Friends
The pounding of Hamas government buildings, rocket armories and weapon caches by the Israeli air force is in its fifth day. Hamas keeps firing salvos of rockets at Israeli towns, though they are less in number, the larger rocket artillery has been rolled out and Israeli civilians as far away as 40 kilometers from Gaza are within firing range. Around a half-dozen Israeli citizens have been killed. The Palestinian death toll is far greater, in part because Hamas has hidden their weapon arsenals and military assets in the densest populated urban centers. No doubt, death will claim more than 400 victims by end of the first day of 2009 in the so-called “holy” land.

Worldwide mass demonstrations, especially from Arab populations, condemning Israel has been surprisingly swift and well organized. Even the mainstream US television media outlets usually biased in favor of Israeli actions pour out their sentimentality in these emotive times to the Palestinian victims of overwhelming Israeli air strikes in violence not seen in Gaza since the Six Day War of June 1967. At that time the Gaza Strip enclave of refugee camps-cum-crowded Palestinian ghettos became Israel’s burden to oversee when the soldiers of David and Solomon routed an invasion attempt by the Egyptians.

It is easy to feel sympathy for victims of air strikes. It is a predictable and even programmed response to sympathize with, and somehow ennoble, the role of the victim.

I’m going to say some things in the blog that are sure to shock and upset some of you. I do this in the spirit of compassion. I must do this because I too have all the faults and habitually programmed wounds of my brothers and sister human beings inside me. I have learned from direct experience that sometimes the scab of illusion must be cut hard to open deep wounds to the healing air.

My blog is dedicated not only to commenting on current events reflected in prophecy but it also stands as my testimony of experiences since my initiation into meditation in 1980. I aim to help readers understand and try to transcend what makes all of us human beings so “predictable” and therefore doomed to repeat the past and call it “the future.”

I propose that intelligent and loving solutions exist only in the clarity of living in the eternity of the present. By facing and understanding the mechanics of our predictable habits, we can see how these are unconsciously infected into us like a germ through mis-education of each new generation. Prophecy is mostly doom laden and functions because we are made to make our children as predictable as we have been. We mostly are trained to do this accidentally and unconsciously. Thus, the world muddles on from one misery to the next. This web blog is one small effort in the enlightening of people about this syndrome so that it might help people break free from a state of habitual behavior passed on by one miserable generation to the next. I call that syndrome The Antichrist Unconscious.

I propose to you, reader, that victims are equally responsible for a crime against humanity as are the victimizers. Neither is to be praised or vilified. Both sides of the same dysfunctional coin need to be understood. Understanding will bring transformation.

Because modern journalism is more “opinionism” than at any time before, and emotion sells advertisement, it is all too easy to forget what caused this current crisis in Gaza. Both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian battle of cousin brother descendants of the great Semite patriarch Abraham have fallen into a deep and unconscious mass-psychotic state wherein both sides play victim and victimizer. I will eventually write an entire book on this matter and for now, as I am deeply involved in finishing my newest digital book “Predictions for 2009″ can only give you a morsel, a falafel for thought on this complicated Middle Eastern mess. Very briefly, here’s the outline of this Semite marriage of victims and victimizers made in hell:

In 1947-48, the British overlords relinquishing their hold on Palestine and along with the United Nations, without much forethought or respect for the views of Jews and Arabs living in Palestine, partitioned the place into Jewish and Palestinian enclaves.

Once handed the mess, the Palestinians and fellow neighboring Arab tribes and countries chose a path to war rather than peaceful resolution with their Jewish neighbors in 1948. They tried to push the Jews into the sea and they lost the war.

Both sides had committed atrocities but a majority of Palestinians chose to become refugees. Upwards of 700,000 were scattered in their own Diaspora.  They set up crowded refugee camps in Lebanon, in the Egyptian held Gaza Strip and camps mostly in the West Bank region governed by Jordan. A few hundred thousand Palestinians decided it was better to risk staying on their land, face their fears and face a future as citizens of the new Jewish state. There were no massacres waiting for those who didn’t run away. These Palestinians chose not to be victims, even if they risked persecution and death doing it.

The state of Israel would have been a very different place if most of the Palestinians had risked staying  as a sizable minority at nearly  a parity in number with the Jews. Owning land is empowerment in the Middle East. All rationalizations aside, when a land owner becomes a refugee he has chosen disenfranchisement.  Choose the path of a refugee and you choose the life of a victim.

Palestinians may have faced persecution and even atrocities if they had remained, but then again, there is political power in numbers, even under tyranny and with time the situation can improve. Take for instance South Africa. The whites in the end had to come to some understanding with the black majority and share their country. If most of the Palestinians had not abandoned their lands they would have enjoyed a near equal ratio of Arabs to Jewish citizens in Israel. If there had been a chance for a “two peoples one state” solution that was it.  If most of the Palestinians had stood their ground the Jews at that time would not have had the power to force them off their lands for they barely won the war. A large and integrated Arab population would have compelled the founders of Israel to find some workable solution towards living together. Indeed proof of such an equitable solution is self-evident when one considers the treatment of Arabs who stayed on to become Israeli citizens. It’s not a perfect fit, but Arab Israelis do not live in the squalor of the camps, in hopelessness, in a climate rife with radicalization. This is the bitter legacy left to future generations by  those who choose the path of flight after fight in 1948.

An Arab rush to war created the state of Israel, rather than that of two peoples trying to live within one state that was once Palestine. Like it or not, the world rushed to a solution without consulting the parties and it is too late to return the clock to 1947-48. Because of the UN decision, the nations of the world are burdened with the karma of troubles from the Middle East as well. This problem in Palestine is the world’s problem. We are all in some way obligated to find a Palestinian-Jewish solution otherwise our sons and daughters will continue to be drawn into wars there. Perhaps even Armageddon.

The Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular keep choosing a path of militancy after 1948 that only magnifies defeat and victimization. Again in 1967, leagues of Arab armies threatened to push the Jews into the sea and they lost. Israel as a consequence expanded its territories to include large populations of the dispossessed Palestinians from 1948 living in what became the Israeli occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank. Victory now turned the Jews of Israel into victims and victimizers. Even to this day the sons and daughters of concentration camp survivors guard against and frequently re-occupy  the vast concentration camps of Palestinian refugees they won in battle.

After 1967, it became the Jewish Israelis’ turn to play victim, because the occupation of further  territories to give them breathing space from their enemies brought them the burden of occupation.  Conquest brought decades of terror in its wake from Palestinian guerrilla movements.

If there are rockets falling by the hundreds from Gaza, victimizing Jews in Israel it is because the Israeli Jews are in part responsible for the lethal rain. Occupation of peoples and lands has not brought more security as it was hoped in 1967, only more war. Only a new war for Issac’s sons and daughters of the Mogen David now amassing as I write this for a ground invasion into Gaza.

Right now, the sons and daughters of Ishmael, under Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip are earning far more sympathy as “victims” of an overwhelming retaliation of Israeli military might. These people may soon see Israeli tanks in their ruined streets and suffer being in the crossfire of an Arab-Israeli version of the Battle of Stalingrad.

It may sound cruel to say it. The truth is cruel to our illusions. The Palestinians of Gaza have brought this misery upon themselves.

It is about time someone stated a fact mostly overlooked by the media in these initially shocking days of the newest Arab-Israeli conflict: Arab leadership in the form of radical Hamas once again has chosen war over negotiation and the people of Gaza are now suffering for it. The long held cease-fire between Hamas and Israel was clearly broken by Hamas, not with one but 350 rockets launched at Israeli towns before the first Israeli jet responded. And once again, the Arabs miscalculate how complete and vigorous Israel’s military response can be. The war ending 2008 is 1948, is 1967 all over again.

There are certainly crimes committed by Arab and Jewish cousin brothers that could paint this blog black with righteous grievances; however, the unconscious habit of Palestinians to go to war with Jews just doesn’t work to their better interests. The Arab Palestinians collectively as a people have adopted political impotency as a habit. Just look at who they choose to lead them. They get our sympathies but they only dig more graves for their future and for peace. The jihadists of Hamas have  made their babies human shields putting their armaments, rocket factories and training camps in the densest populated areas. Who chose Hamas to rule over these poor Palestinian bystanders?

Back in elections held in 2007, Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian government. A vast majority of Palestinians currently being bombed had voted Hamas into power because for all their faults, the theocratic zealots of Hamas promised and “did” run Gaza better than the more secularized and corrupt Fatah Palestinian Party of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Still, the price of voting for Hamas is now being paid in Israeli air strikes, hundreds killed, thousands injured and a ground invasion of Gaza imminent.

The vote for Hamas was a vote for further victimization. The Palestinians of Gaza chose a government that openly declares war as its chief policy against a country it doesn’t recognize. As long as Palestinians with their vote choose those who live by the sword rather than the olive branch of peace, they all will continue to live miserably and die by that sword.

John Hogue
(31 December 2008)

Nostradamus and a Future Nuclear War
Lost by a Country symbolized by “Three Lions”

Friends,
Flames vomited orange clouds billowing like ghosts of Hari Krishna swamis released from the funerary pyre that had become the southwestern roof of Mumbai’s Hotel Taj Mahal, on Midnight, 27 November. A floodlight illuminated the delicate Maratha-style cupola atop the great tiled dome. The scotoma glare transported me to scry shapes of statuary out of overexposed hoary white floodlit pillars. The pillars had morphed into the statues of lions that at any moment could collapse in the suttee of terrorist lit firestorms. The smoke and flame threatening dome and cupola was the end result of jihadists running amok through the hotel halls, setting off gasoline bombs with grenades, pounding on hotel room doors searching for Western hostages, among them my friends. These jihadists played a deadly game of hide and “seeking” death and seventy-seven virgins in “Osama-bin-lying” paradise.

Above the curtain of fire smoke feeding a lungi veil of orange night skies, and bathed in floodlight, the pillars had become in my inner eye the white stone gathering of lions in tight circle atop the dome. These animal totems of the modern Indian State, stood on haunches at rest, in my reverie, forepaws straight, defiantly mute as if unmoved by the gunshots and explosions. Heraldry in stone looked down “en passant” at hunkering members of the world press agencies of TV networks, giving their sing-songy, fire and smoke singed South Asian accented reports, somewhat breathless with fear yet literate. The cadence of their account often interrupted by echoes of bullet ricochets on the stone expanses at their feet, or drowned out when the flash and thunder sticks of Indian Army sniper rifles atop the nearby Gates of India Monument tore the air overhead.

The vision lions in white lights above the fray reminded me of Nostradamus’ prophecy about India basing its animal totem of three lions on that of their British colonial masters. I introduced my readers to this interpretation in writings published 12 years ago, and retuned to the concept in my Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy bulletin of 31 December 2001.

Indian scholars wished to remind me each time I published the following interpretation that there are “four” lions in their animal totem tableau; however, as the picture above shows, one’s point of view only sees three lions at a time. A vision, be it mine or Nostradamus’ would see the same.

The following quatrain from Century 7 of Nostradamus’ prophecies was written in 1556 and could hint what Gandhi’s final Indo-Pakistani war in his prophecy might look like:

***

The prophet Nostradamus may have foreseen its outcome in Century 7 Quatrain 16. If the leaders of India and Pakistan could read this following warning, perhaps they would pause and reflect before they pass over the Line of Control, and send history out of control.

Entree profonde par la grand Royne faicte
Rendra le lieu puissant inaccessible:
L’armee des troys lyons sera deffaite,
Faisant dedans cas hideux & terrible.

The deep entry made by the great queen
Will render the place powerful and inaccessible:
The army of the three lions will be defeated,
Causing within a hideous and terrible event.

In 1996 I wrote the following interpretation for this quatrain in Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies:

“In 1985, Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, was gunned down by Sikh separatists who had infiltrated her bodyguards. The murder was in retaliation for her ordering the Indian Army’s bloody attack of Khalistani guerrillas holding out within the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The ‘great queen’ could be Mrs. Gandhi or her granddaughter, Priyanka, who is being groomed for power by the Congress Party. The army of ‘three lions’ is the Indian Army, (the Republic of India has ‘three lions’ huddled together in its federal device). If Nostradamus is not alluding to this incident, perhaps, he is implying some future defeat of a descendant of Gandhi in a war over Jammu-Kashmir and the Punjab. The final line could describe a breakdown of Indian society in the wake of sectarian violence after the defeat. Or perhaps ‘within’ something worse. Maybe our prophet is warning of a plague from ‘within,’ in other words, a radiation scourge caused by a nuclear disaster at the atomic plant near Mumbai (Bombay), or from a nuclear bush war with Pakistan sometime between 1996 to 2026.”

Exerpt from:
Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy, 31 December 2001
Quoting from pp. 510-511 of “Nostrdamus: The Complete Prophecies”

***

On the Winter Solstice, and exactly 4 years before the most accurate prophecy ancient clock, the “Long Count” of the Mayan Calender, runs out of time — to what apocalyptic end, either of doom or revelation, is not certain — the Trident-Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels in Mumbai reopened for business. The dead terrorists and their victims have been buried or burned on pyres, the blood in the halls of hotels washed clean. The façade of normalcy in traumatized Mumbai hides the seething passion for revenge and a reckonning with Pakistan. The cool Indian winter months might suppress these nationalist passions, but come mid-February, when the subtropical heat rises, what will come as a consequence of the following issues laid before the government of Pakistan by that of India on the Winter Solstice?

The surviving terrorist prisoner is using the last weapon left to him well. His tongue spits out rapid-fire evidence of extensive rogue Pakistani involvement in the training of his person with tacit support of some Pakistani military and government elements. He and his squad of attackers are a handful of hundreds of other terrorists, trained in camps in Pakistan, poised for future attacks on Westerners in India and even the West. As Mumbai hotels celebrated their opening in defiance of that terror, New Delhi demands its opposites in Islamabad do something, and soon, to control its militant proxies and militants operating inside Pakistan.

Islamabad, so far, has done nothing.

When the air starts getting hot and sultry in the sub-continent, and if Pakistan remains recalcitrant about its own home grown terror camps, India’s air force and paratroopers may lay fire upon them, before flame trees and jacaranda’s of the hot season bloom.

We will be on the brink of an Indo-Pakistani military confrontation when punitive attack happens. Part Six will show just how much a confrontation of the near future in 2009 may look more like a crisis from the near past back in 2001-2002.

John Hogue
(29 December 2008)

Israeli air strikes on Gaza City.

Friends,
The Gaza strip is on fire. This Palestinian refugee enclave-cum-failing attempt of a Palestinian State, run now by the Islamic fundamentalist organization HAMAS, has been lobbing  escalating volleys of rockets at neighboring Jewish settlements in Israel.

Israel’s long threatened full-scale response has come. It appears the Middle East has yet a new war to mark the New Year. Israeli F-16 bombers have infernally decorated the Gaza City skyline with a grove of mushrooming cloud columns as key Hamas police, government, rocket manufacturing centers and training centers were pulverized by 2,000 pound bombs, initially killing 225 people, local hospitals reported. Cramming those blood-soaked emergency rooms are another 700 wounded, mostly civilians, report Hamas officials.

This is unlike any Israeli surgical attack on Gaza in its long and sad history as a dumping ground for displaced Palestinians after they and other neighboring Arab armies tried to push the Jews into the sea and failed in their war gamble of 1948.

This refugee camp of tents has since become the squalid and vast string of slums crowding an area the size of Washington District of Columbia and teaming with 1.6 million Palestinians. Once a protectorate camp run by the Egyptians, the Israeli’s after the Six Day War of 1967, made it their burden. Some would say, their concentration camp to manage and police. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, ill-conceived promptings in part by the Bush administration for democratic elections won the extremists of Hamas a majority control of the Gaza Strip over the more secular and Western-friendly Palestinian Fatah Party (winning a majority in the West Bank). Unlike Fatah, Hamas does not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. Israel pulled out all settlements and policing of the Gaza Strip in 2005. However, most of the Palestinians within Gaza believe their jailers have only moved outside of the wall of the concentration camp, controlling their airspace and approaches to their ports. Even Palestinian money meant to finance basic government services has been withheld by Israel. Then again, why should the Israelis help a government function in Gaza that bombs its cities with rockets and blows up its civilians with suicide bombers?

Then again…(there are far too many “then agains” when trying to unravel the ancient hatred of cousin-brother Semites — Arab and Jewish sons of biblical Abraham).

Then again, Israel took Gaza from Egypt in 1967 and didn’t give it back to Egypt when territories were returned with the Camp David Peace Accords in 1979. Then again…Egypt probably didn’t want it back. Even for other Arabs, the Palestinians are often seen as a problem tribe.

There was a man born of Jews in 1503 who had recently converted to Christianity, so that they wouldn’t be banished from Provence. He may have named notorious “HAMAS” in the following prophecy written 4.5 centuries ago. I have inserted the “H” in the French word “amas” as it may have been purposely dropped to keep it in code:

La republique miserable infelice,
Sera vastee de nouueau magistrat:
Leur grand (H)amas de l’exile malefice,
Fera Sueue rauir leur grand contracts.

The miserable, unhappy, republic,
Will be devastated by the new magistrate:
Their great (H)amassing of wicked exile,
Will cause the Swiss to carry off their great contracts.

Nostradamus (1555)
Century 1 Quatrain 61

Is this a prophecy for the “miserable republic” that Hamas runs in the Gaza Strip? Are Gaza’s citizens suffering bombardment today decendants of the “wicked exile” of the Palestinian Diaspora? Is Nostradamus hiding the United Nations in a code for the Swiss who have within their borders, in Geneva, the main UN center outside of New York City, in Europe?

BBC reported today that Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the unprecedented military operation “may take some time” before it’s over — but he pledged to avoid a humanitarian crisis.

“It’s not going to last a few days,” he said on Israeli television, flanked by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

The prime minister is under the delusion of wishful thinking. We will see this in the next blog about the future of Hamas when we delve in detail into the secrets hidden in Nostradamus’ Hamas quatrain.

John Hogue
(27 December 2009)

The scene of an Indian-Pakistani border clash from 1999

A gathering of Forces at the Razor’s Edge
Of Gandhi’s Fourth and Nuclear War?

Friends,
The crisis begins. One that could overshadow all others coming in the New Year of 2009.

Today (26 December 2008), Associated press reports Pakistani troops are heading for the border with India. The 20,000 men of the 14th Infantry Division have moved to forward positions between the towns of Kasur and Sialkot along the disputed militarized border frontier dividing Kashmir known as the Line of Control. Intelligence reports describe large Pakistani units previously fighting al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are pulling out of West Pakistani tribal regions heading east in preparation to man the Indo-Pakistani line. Two strategic goals of the Mumbai terrorist attacks have been fulfilled: 1.) Renew a crisis between India and Pakistan; and, 2.) Relieve the military pressure brought to bear on al-Qaeda and Taliban centers of operation in Western Pakistan along the border of Afghanistan.

Usama bin Laden, one of Nostradamus’ chief candidates for what he calls Mabus, the Third Antichrist, is the dean of global jihadist terrorism. He has trained those who trained Pakistani terrorist commandos who inflicted death and chaos in the heart of Mumbai’s financial district in November. Though he does not, indeed needs not, directly overlord or even plan these attacks, he is responsible for the evil vision and training of those who do.

A great destruction of people and animals, as Nostradamus predicted may be Usama bin Laden’s intent. It will include the martyrdom of Pakistan in a nuclear war with infidel Hindu-dominated India that is intended to unite and radicalize one-sixth of the world’s people who are Muslim to wage jihad.

The nukes and rumors of nukes being stockpiled in South Asia since the late 1980s has compelled hot headed hawks in the governments of India and Pakistan to rush to the brink of war a number of times yet so far they dare not cross that apocalyptic line. I was in India during one of those rushes to that line. It was in the first half of 1990. I reflected upon those days eleven years later in what was written below in December 2001, framing them in childhood memories of the closest time the world came to doomsday:

***

During the Cuban Missile Crisis I watched loved ones peer into soft October skies waiting for Armageddon to fly on contrails of missiles and B-52 bombers. The tension I experienced in India reminded me of those thirteen frightening days from my childhood. I walked in the Indian valleys in the shadow of immanent nuclear death. That feeling returns to me now eleven years later [December 2001] as I watch developments in this newest crisis. I feel India and Pakistan moving inexorably towards the dark frontiers of a fourth war [forseen by Mahatma Gandhi] on the tank treads of mobile ballistic missile launchers.

A FOURTH — AND NUCLEAR — WAR?

In mid-December 2001, eight terrorists identified as members of the Kashmiri insurgent organizations of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e Tayyaba, stormed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. All eight men were killed along with six Indian security servicemen in a failed attempt to annihilate the political leadership of India. Soon afterwards large contingents of the 1.3-million-man Indian army and six-hundred-thousand-man Pakistani army began moving into position facing each other in the winter fastness of Kashmir along the disputed Line of Control. Farther south you see them park their tanks and set up their mortars and artillery along the partition line drawn 54 years before, dividing the heavily populated regions of Punjab. They position their anti-aircraft batteries and mobile ballistic missile launchers behind dunes in the deserts along the western edge of Rajasthan. They prepare dugouts for over a million soldiers down along an invisible line, drawn on the maps of politicians, across the Himilayan fastness of Kashmir all the way down to the salt marshes of the Rann of Kutch along the Arabian Sea.

And there those million men of India, and a half-million men of Pakistan, wait; hopeful for a diplomatic solution.

On Friday, 21 December [2001], the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, Vijay K. Nambiar, promptly left the Pakistani capital declaring a diplomatic impasse. He had learned that Pakistan would not immediately arrest all leaders and members of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e Tayyaba organizations and dismantle their training camps in the Pakistani occupied portion of Kashmir.

Given the new and darker world we live in after terrorists harbored by rogue nations crashed hijacked jets into New York’s skyline and the US Capital, India feels within its rights to demand of Pakistan what America demanded of Taliban ruled Afghanistan: a) arrest all terrorists within their borders; b) close down and destroy their training camps; c) seize and destroy their weapons; and, d) face a full scale military retaliation if there is no compliance to every demand.

What indeed would Americans demand of Pakistan if they where in India’s place? If terrorists from camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir had sprayed the US Capitol Building with grenades and machine guns in an attempt to slaughter the US Senate and US House of Representatives, what would the United States do?

By adopting the Bush terrorism doctrine, India could soon launch an attack on terrorist camps in Pakistani territory but this time, the fourth war foreseen by Gandhi could go nuclear. Current estimates place Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal at 8 to 20 atomic bombs, each with a destructive force similar to those used by the United States in their nuclear attack on Japan in 1945. India may have anywhere from 25 to 40 similarly destructive atomic weapons in its arsenal.

When Gandhi and Jinnah debated the partition of India, there were 340 million people in the balance. Fifty-four years and an explosion of population later, Gandhi’s warning of a fourth and catastrophic war places up to 1.2 billion South Asians in the balance. In the worst case scenario, history’s first nuclear “bush” war could extinguish far more people than all those lost in both world wars of the 20th century. The death toll could be in the hundreds of millions.

Exerpt from:
Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy, 31 December 2001

***

The descriptions above, written exactly seven years ago, sound like today’s news. New terrorist attacks out of Pakistan on India, this time Mumbai, compel Indian leaders to demand the extradition of culprits and the dismantling of camps. It only seems the names of these leaders and organizations have changed. Now, starting with today, begins the military buildup along the border, the ramp up of tensions that could lead us weeks or months away from the brinksmanship of nuclear conflict in South Asia, like before, if this time India moves to punitive attacks on terror camps inside Pakistan.

A report released in May 2002 entitled Disarmament Diplomacy: News Review - India and Pakistan Camped on Brink of War over Kashmir estimated a worst-case scenario death toll far lower than my estimate. The defense agency report calculated an initial 8-12 million deaths in a nuclear exchange.  Millions more later would succumb to radiation poisoning which they did not wish to specify.

“That’s the worst-case scenario,” said an unamed Defense Department official, commenting on the paper, “If we have correctly guessed the number of weapons each side has, and their targets, and presuming they’re all ground bursts versus air bursts… The fatalities if they were air bursts would be slightly smaller by maybe a million, but…that’s still a very significant number…”

The report doesn’t factor in collteral death tolls from disease and famine caused by the destruction of urban Indian and Pakistani urban centers. Maybe a million? The tone of the study almost makes the unthinkable, sound possible. The possible is a view military hawks on both sides of the Line of Control push as sustainable. This mindset is immune to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that kept the Soviets and the Americans from fighting a nuclear war for nearly a half-a-century during the Cold War.

In Part Five of Mumbai 9/11, we ask the prophet Nostradamus for his take on a future Indo-Pakistani nuclear war. He may have described it over four centuries before it may happen.

John Hogue
(26 December 2008)

The Beast of Revelation

Friends,

Happy abducted and sanctified pagan holidays to you all. Today is Christmas 2008, the purported day of Christ’s birth. Whatever your historical, political, or religiously conditioned motivations may be for celebrating this day, I hope you are having the best Christmas ever. It doesn’t matter that Christian bishops stole this pagan celebration of the winter solstice and burning the Yule Time log a few millennia ago. They wanted to market their new religion on the same day and join the fun. Nor does it matter that accounts of the Christian apostles in the New Testament about the birth of Christ have shepherds tending their flocks in the high hills of Bethlehem during winter, and that your Christmas crèche has livestock that should be grazing in fields down in the lowlands of Judea in late December. It isn’t important, at least to me, that sheep and shepherds didn’t, as the bible says, “tend to their flocks” in the environs of Bethlehem until March each year, or that Jesus isn’t a Capricorn but Pisces.

What matters is celebrating your life and each other, and for that, any excuse for celebration and giving on any day is perfectly right.

As this may be the last peaceful Christmas before all hell breaks loose in Bethlehem, India, Pakistan and the Economy, I thought I might share with you all an important insight as a Christmas gift.

When studying prophecy one must cultivate a sense of humor.

In my current avocation as a prophecy scholar, I have read just about every which way seers of the last 10,000 years predict the end of the world. I for one don’t believe the world will end. Steps in our evolution end. There will ever be times of travail and evolutionary challenge for the human race.

Today, as my Christmas gift to you all, I’d like to test just how much you can laugh at doomsday.

The doomsday scripture lampooned in a black-as-sackcloth satire below is the Book of Revelation.

A DOOMSDAY CHRISTMAS CAROL
Lyrics by John Hogue
(Sung to Twelve Days of Christmas)

On the first day of Doomsday my true love gave to me,
Hell fire for eternity.

On the second day of Doomsday my true love gave to me,
Two-thirds killed, burnt, drowned and sickened,
And a hell fire for eternity.

On the third day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
Three Scorpion-copters, stinging me forever,
Two-thirds killed, burnt drowned and sickened
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the fourth day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
Four hellish horsemen, bringing an apocalypse
Three Scorpion-copters, stinging me forever,
Two-thirds killed, burnt drowned and sickened
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the fifth day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
FIVE!    HORRID!!    PLAGUES!!!
Four hellish horsemen,
Three Scorpion-copters,
Two-thirds killed,
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the sixth day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
666, stamped on my forehead,
FIVE!    HORRID!!    PLAGUES!!!
Four hellish horsemen,
Three Scorpion-copters,
Two-thirds killed,
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the seventh day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
Seven seals an’opening, hushing all in heaven
666, stamped on my forehead,
FIVE!    HORRID!!    PLAGUES!!!
Four hellish horsemen,
Three Scorpion-copters,
Two-thirds killed,
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the eight day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
Eight false prophets, dancing on my dogma
Seven seals an’opening, hushing all in heaven
666, stamped on my forehead,
FIVE!    HORRID!!    PLAGUES!!!
Four hellish horsemen,
Three Scorpion-copters,
Two-thirds killed,
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the nineth day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
Nine armored saviors, sword tongues-a-slashing
Eight false prophets, dancing on my dogma
Seven seals an’opening, hushing all in heaven
666, stamped on my forehead,
FIVE!    HORRID!!    PLAGUES!!!
Four hellish horsemen,
Three Scorpion-copters,
Two-thirds killed,
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the tenth day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
Ten horns atop a multiheaded beastie
Nine armored saviors, sword tongues-a-slashing
Eight false prophets, dancing on my dogma
Seven seals an’opening, hushing all in heaven
666, stamped on my forehead,
FIVE!    HORRID!!    PLAGUES!!!
Four hellish horsemen,
Three Scorpion-copters,
Two-thirds killed,
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the eleventh day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
Eleven hells a-bursting, tons of naked sinners
Ten horns atop a multiheaded beastie
Nine armored saviors, sword tongues-a-slashing
Eight false prophets, dancing on my dogma
Seven seals an’opening, hushing all in heaven
666, stamped on my forehead,
FIVE!    HORRID!!    PLAGUES!!!
Four hellish horsemen,
Three Scorpion-copters,
Two-thirds killed,
And a hellfire for eternity.

On the twelfth day of Doomsday my true love gave to me
Twelfth hour terrors, tormenting my end time
Eleven hells a-bursting, tons of naked sinners
Ten horns atop a multiheaded beastie
Nine armored saviors, sword tongues-a-slashing
Eight false prophets, dancing on my dogma
Seven seals an’opening, hushing all in heaven
666, stamped on my forehead,
FIVE!    HORRID!!    PLAGUES!!!
Four hellish horsemen,
Three Scorpion-copters,
Two-thirds killed…

And a hellfire for eternity.

Happy Holidays, and with tongue in cheek.

John Hogue
(25 December 2008)

Photo: www.aboutadidam.org/contacts/index2.html

Friends
Many emails have come because of this series. I wish to share some of these with you all and insert my response:

EMAILER:
Very much appreciate the balanced view of your comments on Adi Da Samraj. I have been his devotee for 30 years, and have been a blindly believing cultist at times, and have made most of the other possible mistakes in the guru/devotee relationship as well. However, Adi Da never settled for egoity in any form, even when disguised as devotion. He served beyond human capacity in his absolute commitment to the liberation of his devotees, and all beings. I am profoundly grateful to have been alive while he was.

MY REPLY:

From my own experience of the master-disciple love affair I have with Osho, one passes through blind love to conscious love of a master, just like one might start with what Tom Cruise once famously — and honestly — quipped was “lust then trust” for his love process with Nicole Kidman.

Forgive the vulgar metaphor but I think it is necessary for those who have not yet enjoyed the higher relationship of love of a master. There is a kind of emotional euphoria that one has in initiation with a master. It is a higher initial “lust” — it is a yearning for the higher, a thirst for the light. One sees that light shine radiant in one’s spiritual teacher. If it is true light then this spiritual lust, to be close, to be merged with the teacher becomes “trust” in the process of being “taught” to travel the same road, eventually on one’s own merit by that teacher. As anyone who has loved a master knows, the honeymoon of initiation is followed by the work on one’s self under a master’s compassionate and sometimes-hard instruction. Osho was ever subtle in his spiritual hits and hugs. Love hurts. Higher love hurts deeper, but it is unutterably sweeter than mundane love.

We disciples used to laugh at ourselves and sing the Roberta Flack song “Killing Me Softly With His Song” as our theme song:

Strumming my pain with his fingers,
Singing my life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing me softly with his song,
Telling my whole life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song…

Here is a second emailer who I felt voiced honest skepticism about his master. The kind that all disciples from time to time might feel:

EMAILER:
Interesting comments. As a full Adi Da retard, who first became interested in spirituality through J. Krishnamurti, I find your comments interesting. But it sort of brings up a few questions, such as how Adi Da and J.K. could be put in the same grouping, in that Adi Da was precisely the kind of authoritarian Guru J.K. spent much of his life railing against, and Adi Da was an outspoken critic of J.K. as  “talking school” figure of no real spiritual force.

MY REPLY
I sat before J. Krishnamurti three times, in Ojai, California in the spring of 1981. I had the pleasure of conspiring to create a situation that made him laugh in public — a rare thing! That’s a story for another day.

There’s a long held tradition in the East that teachers publicly criticize each other. If they are authentically enlightened, they do these slams on each other not to get one-upmanship on the other, steal, and convert followers. Real teachers are not politicians. Real teachers criticize each other for us.

They throw us into a reevaluation of why we are here with them. Every enlightened being, it seems, comes to their revelation upon their own unique path and authority. They then perhaps become many unique doorways for us to enter into the same mystery room of eternal life. In their criticism, they better contrast the different doors, not because theirs is any better than others. It is done all for you to find the right “door.”

On the other hand, if masters, including your own, start to kick the doors, know well whether they do so to deepen your understanding of the door you have already chosen in which to pass.

EMAILER:
I wonder what your make of Adi Da’s rampant megalomania and narcissism. It’s certainly not unprecedented in spiritual types, but doesn’t it seem very “old school”, and not the harbinger of some new form of spirituality, but rather the death of something long since discredited?

MY REPLY:

The only “rampant megalomania” we can deeply encounter and transcend is within us. Have you understood your own ego? Can a right choice be embarked until you understand this ego in “you”? Are you saying this about Adi Da after discrediting your own ego? It’s your ego that’s the point. Is it not? Maybe your master was an egomaniac and a narcissist and profoundly blind.

Is that your problem?

What about your blindness? Can you see yet? Isn’t your seeing more important than Adi Da’s blindness, if he was indeed blind?

Our true teachers are a paradox dancing in a mystery. It takes guts to be with them for they may be false, or, they may play false to test our truth, each moment – what Gurdjieff called our “living faith” rather than some robotic faith borrowed from others. Osho used to call it our “trust.”

EMAILER:
Likewise, I much appreciated Da’s breaking of taboos when I was in Adidam, but really, is there no discrimination allowed in this?

MY REPLY:
A true master teaches that your discrimination must come from your own inner witnessing consciousness. Whatever they do, even if it is shocking, is done to awaken this inner intelligence. Only false masters have followers.

In the beginning, we are not true to ourselves. Why then do we seek the help of a teacher? Moreover, when we begin the path with a master, we are all to some degree false, because we want to follow them. They even let us worship them according to our falsehood, so that we might come closer and see that falsehood burned away by a conscious process of birthing ourselves with the master as midwife to the mystery.

EMAILER:
Are we really to assume that every Zen teacher whacking his students is actually enlightening them, or are some just assholes who like to take out their frustrations on others?

MY REPLY:
That is the danger. They may be as big an asshole as you or I. That’s why it takes guts to seek a teacher. If we do so to seek ego nourishment, we find egoistic masters. If we are seeking something beyond ego, we may sit at the feet of the egoless.

EMAILER:
Surely, you are aware of the “Dark Zen” scandals of the 1930’s and 40’s, when supposedly enlightened Zen Masters not only approved of the Japanese military conquests of that time, but actually encouraged the slaughter of many innocents, saying that death by the sword was some kind of profound spiritual practice that should be regarded with appropriate awe and respect. So we had zen military officers running around Nanking cutting off the heads of civilians to demonstrate their transcendence of these mundane matter of life and death. I take it you heartily approve?

MY REPLY:
Never assume anything. Who promulgated this “dark Zen” story? Upon what basis do you assume I approve or even know about such a story? A real master teaches us to be spiritual skeptics in the purest sense of that ancient Greek word, which means, “to investigate” and not with prejudice for or against. When a meditator simply witnesses the body, mind and world around him or her, he or she does so without judging. Even the thoughts of judgment that arise are allowed simply to be around one, like a cloud in the sky as the watching continues. Eventually the cloud moves off and there is sky.

EMAILER:
The issue with Da is, sure you gotta break some eggs to make an omelet, but what if all you get are burned omelets? Don’t you at some point have to question the skill of the chef?

MY REPLY:
At some point, will you question the skill of the recipient of the meal? Do you have a good sense of taste in masters? Isn’t that more important? Just what do you “eat” from others?

EMAILER:
In Adi Da’s case, he sure did do a lot of crazy things, and if he’d enlightened a bunch of people, well, that’s probably all be understandable and forgivable. But by his own admission, he’s never enlightened anyone, and hasn’t even produced any mature spiritual practitioners by his own standards, so you gotta ask, what the fuck was the point? Or am I just being bitter and unenlightened to even dare ask these questions?

MY REPLY:
Your question is honest and disciples have asked such questions since the first master taught one. This is the Zen “koan” to meditate upon. Real masters say many things. It is up to the disciple to understand when what is said is a device or provocation or when the words of a master are a frame for something unsaid that you experience.

Do you “know” if anyone was enlightened with Adi Da, or Osho, Or Krishnamurti, or Buddha, or Christ?

Unless “you” are enlightened, how then will you “know”?

Who cares what Adi Da said? What is important is your enlightenment, not his. Bring yourself back to your enlightenment.

Look to what a master says or does that resonates with you beyond your mind, your emotions and your gut.

A real master teaches you to walk without feet. Fly without wings and think without mind.

John Hogue
(24 December 2008)

Osho

Friends,
Your many comments about Adi Da’s great let-go into Mahasamadhi inspired my following responses, which include further details about my own teacher’s unique and simple disappearance from this world.

“TERRY” WROTE:

I am sorry to hear of the Passing of Bubba Free John; I met him one moment as he was leaving a Sacred/Esoteric Bookstore in Los Angeles years ago when we were both young. His look in my eyes left an indelible Impression that still remains to this day. I was especially impressed by his teaching of “Avoiding Relationship” and how Enlightenment is already there Within at any moment. Nameste, John–Keep up the great Work!

MY RESPONSE:

I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting Adi Da in the flesh. Some arrangements were being made a few years ago for a meeting between Adi Da and me at his esthetically beautiful spiritual retreat in Northern California, the Mountain of Attention. The disciple negotiating the arrangements started getting a little, let’s say, political, with me. I then sent along my “endorsement.” I’m sure that if Adi Da was indeed enlightened he would have had a big belly laugh at my endorsement if it could have been delivered, which I don’t think it was. Later I tried to contact my go-between’s email address but it came up non-functioning.

My lady friend met Adi Da in a jacuzzi in Harbin Hot Springs, CA, way back around the same time you chanced upon him on the threshold of a bookstore. She also had a similar impression about him. He was a wonderful man and “Murti.”

I heard his rolling laugh in audiotapes: a deep and sonorous chortle that could reach into the darkness and give even a blue whale pleasure.

I once heard him sing. Being a former opera singer, I was struck by his vocal power and high baritone range. He was singing a song, I believe is called: “I am the Heart.” Adi Da might have been an accomplished Opera star if he had gone in that Samsarian (illusory-worldly) direction.

Singing is one of the easiest ways to connect with the heart. That is why so many devotional and meditative traditions use it– as they do dancing. Singing opens the heart, dancing opens the body-mind.

From what I can tell there was a lot of singing and dancing in Adi Da’s ashrams and meditation retreats. I sincerely hope his devotees have not forgotten to sing, dance and celebrate his passing.

As for one who has seen his own spiritual master taken to the burning ghats, one must celebrate the great gift of existence that a true spiritual teacher can be.

Adi Da’s passing reminds me of what my friend, and Osho’s doctor, Amrito, about his final moments relayed back on 20 January 1990, the day after Osho’s passing.

The account reminds me how even at the very end, Osho behaved in that simple, “all is good,” accepting, down to earth and often funny way he embraced life.

***

AMRITO’s Report:

As you know, over these last few days Osho’s body has been becoming noticeably weaker. What you may not know is that he has also been in considerable pain. By the night of the 18th, the pain in his legs was so severe that he was not able even to come stand on the podium and be with us.

Over that night, he became weaker and weaker. Every movement of the body was obviously agonizing. Yesterday morning I noticed that his pulse was also weak and slightly irregular.

I said I thought he was dying. He nodded. I asked him if we could call in the cardiologists and prepare for cardiac resuscitation. He said, “No, just let me go. Existence decides its timing.”

I was helping him to the bathroom when he said, “And you put wall-to-wall carpet in here, just like this bath mat.” Then he insisted on walking over to his chair. He sat down and made arrangements for the few items that he has in his room.

“Who should this go to?” He said, pointing to his small stereo. “It is audio? Nirupa would like it?” He asked.

Nirupa has cleaned his room for so many years.

And then he went carefully around the room and left instructions for every item. “Those you take out,” he said, pointing to the dehumidifiers, which he had found too noisy recently. “And always make sure one air conditioner is on,” he continued.

It was incredible. Very simply, in a very matter-of-fact and precise way, he looked at everything. He was so relaxed, as if he were going for the weekend.

He sat on the bed and I asked what we should do for his Samadhi. “You just put my ashes in Chuang Tzu, under the bed. And then people can come in and meditate there.”

“And what about this room?” I asked.

“This would be good for the Samadhi?” He asked.

“No,” I said, “Chuang Tzu will be beautiful.”

I said we would like to keep his present bedroom as it is.

“So you make it nice,” he said. And then he said he would like it marbled.

“And what about the celebration?” I asked.

“Just take me to Buddha Hall for ten minutes,” he said, “and then take me to the burning ghats — and put my hat and socks on me before you take my body.”

I asked him what I should say to you all. He said to tell you that since his days in the [US] Marshal’s cell in Charlotte, North Carolina, in America, his body has been deteriorating. He said that in the Oklahoma jail they poisoned him with thallium and exposed him to radiation, which we only came to know when the medical experts were consulted.

He said they had poisoned Him in such a way that would leave no proof. “My crippled body is the work of the Christian fundamentalists in the United States government.”

He said that he had kept his pain to himself, but “living in this body has become a hell.”

He lay down and rested again. I went and told Jayesh what was happening and that Osho was obviously leaving his body.

When Osho called again, I told him Jayesh was here and he said for Jayesh to come in.

We sat on the bed and Osho gave us his final words.

“Never speak of me in the past tense,” he said. “My presence here will be many times greater without the burden of my tortured body. Remind my people that they will feel much more. They will know immediately.”

At one point I was holding his hand and I started to cry.

He looked at me, almost sternly, “No, no,” he said, “that is not the way.”

I immediately stopped and he just smiled beautifully.

Osho then spoke to Jayesh and talked about how he wanted the expansion of the work to continue. He said that now that he was leaving his body, many more people would come; many more people’s interest would show, and his work would expand incredibly beyond our ideas.

Then he whispered so quietly that Jayesh had to put his ear very close to him, and Osho said, “And remember, Anando is my messenger.” Then he paused, and said, “No, Anando will be my medium.”

At that point Jayesh moved to one side, and Osho said to me, “Medium will be the right word?”

I hadn’t heard what had preceded it so I didn’t understand.

“Meeting?” I said.

“No,” he replied, “for Anando, medium - she will be my medium.”

He lay back quietly and we sat with him while I held his pulse. Slowly it faded. When I could hardly feel it, I said, “Osho, I think this is it.”

He just nodded gently, and closed his eyes for the last time.

***

I recall Amrito lowered his microphone at this point, leaned forward and started to sob, as did many of us in the hall.

Suddenly a very loud and strident blast from the meditation resort’s Rooster Clock blared, “COCK-AH-DOODLE-DOOOOO!!!”

Tears immediately melted into peals of laughter.

A few years back Osho suggested we install a sound system wired across the resort to mark the passing of each hour with a rooster call. Sort of a funny way to remind all the people working and, visiting this teaming compound to “wake up.”

There are no tears of sadness at the passing of a master. Only tears of joy and an occasional COCK-AH-DOODLE-DOOOOO!!!

John Hogue
(21 December 2008)

Reenactment of the assassination of Gandhi, done with figurines.

Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy

Friends
Mahatma Gandhi is not often remembered as a prophet. Nor would he wish to be regarded as one, especially the prophet of South Asia’s doom.

“The Partition of India will be the cause of four wars with Pakistan!”

He made this declaration in 1947, before the Partition of India transpired. Before a Hindu fundamentalist gunned him down in 1948. They ironically blamed Gandhi for the mayhem of partition he had tried so desperately, even prophetically, to prevent. I’m sure Gandhi hoped against hope that an augured caveat of four future wars sprouting from proposed partition would motivate the Muslim League of Ali Jinnah and his own Congress Party to forbear slicing up the sub-continent into religiously nationalistic enclaves whose very polarizing existence would, he believed, bring a string of military catastrophes that need not be.

We resume the historical account I wrote for my HogueProphecy Bulletin “Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy” (31 December 2001) describing how first three of the predicted four wars came about:

***

Gandhi lived to see the first Indo-Pakistani war erupt in the mountains of Jammu-Kashmir at the close of 1947. This disputed Himalayan kingdom ruled by a Hindu Maharaja before the partition of India had a predominantly Muslim population. Both India and Pakistan claimed it. After the Maharaja had ceded Kashmir to India, he requested military help as mobile columns of Pakistani troops and armed Pathan tribesmen invaded through the Himalayan passes heading for the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar. Indian forces checked their lightning strike and United Nations intervention resulted in the battle line becoming the de facto new border between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir known to this day as the Line of Control. The first war resulted in roughly two-thirds of Kashmir remaining in Indian hands. Pakistan would demand of India that she let the people of Kashmir hold a special plebiscite to decide whether to incorporate into India or not. India would delay the Kashmiri plebiscite for decades. In 1960, Communist China signed a friendship pact with Pakistan and seized a large portion of Indian-held Kashmir two years later in a surprise offensive

In 1965, India and Pakistan fought a second and much larger war over dominion of Kashmir across the frontiers of West Pakistan. India sent 900,000 troops in a crushing, three-pronged offensive against the Pakistani defenses on the approaches to Lahore. Over 450 Pakistani tanks were destroyed. A UN cease-fire forestalled the intervention of Communist China on the side of Pakistan.

A third and even bloodier Indo-Pakistani conflict came six years later in 1971. A civil war in East Pakistan between Muslim Bengali insurgents (tacitly supported and armed by India) and an occupying army of mainly West Pakistanis escalated into a wider war with India. It started when the wholesale round up and massacre of hundreds of thousands of suspected Bengali civilians by West Pakistani soldiers caused ten million refugees to flood into India and overwhelm its emergency food resources. US President Richard Nixon declared that India’s support of Bengali insurgents was an attempt to destabilize Pakistan — a US client state during the Cold War— and he cut off India’s American credit. Pakistani jets promptly bombed Indian airfields in Kashmir. The Indian army entered the war on the side of the insurgents. In twelve days they successfully shattered Pakistani forces on two fronts and captured an entire Pakistani army of 90,000 men in East Pakistan. East Pakistan became the new country of Bangladesh.

Pakistan had not only lost the war but lost half of its population and two-thirds of its export economy. The army and economy were on the verge of collapse. Pakistan stressed its economy further trying to catch up with India in a nuclear arms race obtaining nuclear weapons capability at the close of the 1980s. Around the same time, it also supplied arms and safe havens for Kashmiri insurgents to wage a decade-long civil war in Jammu-Kashmir. Border clashes across the Line of Control were frequent throughout the 1990s.

I was traveling through India in the spring of 1990 when the two countries nearly fulfilled Gandhi’s prophecy and fought a fourth war. Rumors abounded in the Indian press that India was contemplating a preemptive blitzkrieg strike to take out Pakistan’s nuclear program before they could make deliverable nuclear weapons. However, a report from Indian spies in Pakistan made an ominous discovery. They saw new bomb racks on the wings of Pakistani jet bombers large enough to load atomic weapons. Was Pakistan bluffing? Could they really deliver their nuclear payloads? The Indian government ordered their conventional forces to stand down.

Excerpt from:
Mahatma Gandhi’s Prophecy, 31 December 2001

***

There had been frequent border incidents throughout the rest of the 1990s, the worst being prompted by a future dictator of Pakistan in May 1999, General Pervez Musharraf, in a sharp action atop a mountainous section just south of the Siachen Glacier near the town of Kargil on Line of Control dividing Kashmir. Given the account just presented of the last three wars, the border clash, known as the Kargil War (May-July 1999), doesn’t count as Gandhi’s fourth war, as some of you might want to believe. Gandhi’s fourth war will not be some local battle, no matter how intense, fought in one sector in Kashmir. It must be a war not in one sector of the Indo-Pakistani border, but along all sectors. There must be deep incursions by air launched by the Pakistani and Indian air forces. There must be naval confrontations at sea.

A full-scale war didn’t erupt from the Kargil clash because of mountain blasts of a different level of magnitude had happened a year before. Pakistan successfully detonated their first atomic weapons tests deep inside the craggy wall of a Baluchistani mountain range shaking dust off its cliffs in five successful attempts. The largest of these unleashed a 5.0 earthquake unloading a blast yield in the belly of the mountain of 12 kilotons. India responded with its own televised underground tests in the Rajasthani Desert. (India had tested its first atom bomb back in 1974.)

Border clashes and shelling would remain frequent occurances after the tests up to and beyond the Kargil battle and all the way to present day. Indeed, small arms fire and limited shelling  along the Line of Control has increased since July 2008.

The last major standoff of millions of Indian and Pakistani troops came in late 2001 with no full-scale war. Apparently, no one on either side now dares push conventional conflict to the extremes of the past.

If they did — if India “does” in the near future to punish Pakistan for the Mumbai terror attacks — Gandhi’s fourth war could go nuclear.

John Hogue
(19 December 2008)

Friends
President G.W. Bush’s secret flights to Iraq began and ended with two stunts. The first was a real turkey; the second delivered to Bush the symbolic Arab shoe insult out the door of history.

Bush flew into Iraqi International Airport for a brief 2.5-hour photo op to praise the troops and pass the cranberries at a 2003 Thanksgiving Day dinner celebration, the first after his mission in Iraq was “accomplished.”

All Michael Moore-onic diuretic surges to judgment aside, our fearless president, ducking in and out of Baghdad before anyone in the growing Iraqi insurrection might take a pot shot at Air force One, was a “real” Turkey holder. The bronzed and perfectly glazed bird was not plastic, as Moore and other Donkeycrat blogs enthused. It “was” too good to be eaten, though, because it was cooked by US contractors as a decoration plate, commonly adorning the mess eateries of US forces abroad.

Don’t think that I’m clearing the name of a Lame Duck turned a turkey on that opening clandestine junket to Iraq. Have you ever had a surprise guest come over to your feast, get a little too excited, wanting to show off, grab a large dinner decoration off the table and start wandering about your guests: a little too much “Ho, ho, ho,” happy “Hollandazed and confused”?

That’s what the Bush Turkey from Texas did. He traipsed around less for the guests — the 600 soldiers in the makeshift Iraqi Airport cafeteria — far more as the lightning rod for flashes of press cameras. Out stuck his proud chest, wide cracked his Joker “V” of a grin in full bemused fool mode, arms hugging the trophy turkey tableau he pinched from the main table to goof and swagger with it around the serried ranks of libating and masticating soldiers. Shucks! What a great idea!

Advance five Holiday Seasons ahead. Hurdle with the speed of Air Force One jet engines as fast as you can past a legacy of 4,500 coalition force fatalities, another 1,000 sometimes-Turkey decorating US contractors, 30,000 US military wounded and 2,000 more wounded contractors. Get some distance and altitude to hop over turbulent memories of over a half million dead Iraqis, and untold Iraqi injured, or untold thousands imprisoned and tortured by coalition troops or Iraqis becoming hostages for ransom by Sunni and Shia insurrectionists, or al-Qaeda. Fly, you turkey, fly into Iraq International Airport for one more photo op: the signing ceremony with Iraqi’s Prime Minister al-Maliki for that agreement that in earlier years Bush swore he’d never scratch with pen: a fixed and binding scheduled binding withdrawal of US forces out of Iraq by 2011.

Up came al-Maliki and Bush to their respective podiums for a press conference and off came an Iraqi journalist’s shoes hurled at Bush. The president showed he still had his artful dodging politician and former Yale cheerleader dance steps and blow avoiding ways. Shoe soles seasoned with the open sewered main mean streets of Baghdad just missed the mark, but the stunt by a well known Iraqi TV journalist, someone whose family and person were directly impacted by the consequences of US occupation, was celebrated across Islamic countries of the Middle East. Anyone who has lived in Arab lands will tell you that even crossing your legs in a chair to show the bottom of your footwear is a major insult. Throwing your shoes is THE WORST insult in Arab culture. It is not only filthy but also the supreme gesture of un-manning disrespect of the target.

The journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi who works for Al-Baghdadia channel broadcasting from Cairo, flung them with an Arabic invective that translates to: “It is the farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

Those on the path of meditation and self-awareness will tell you that being the target of such incidents will reveal more than a person’s true character. When undergoing a shocking event, people can reveal their true potentials — the depth of their heart and souls.

The most powerful man in the world, the man who unilaterally invaded a country which caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had a moment to speak intelligently with compassion on the lingering and abject anger seething in the country even the world court considers he illegally occupied. This is the very same anger people hold for Westerners who talk democracy but kill Arabs they earmark for liberaton by the hundreds of thousands. Bush has been consistently clueless how to address the anger that feeds al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups the Muslim men fighting and killing Americans.

Bush had a moment if his soul could use that dedicated idiotic mind to respond to an act so socially heinous that symbolically before the televisions of the world tied Bush as equal to the hated dictator he overthrew. The people of Iraq in 2003 beat the fallen statues of Saddam with their shoes. Now a man throws his shoe in 2008 at the liberator and has become an international hero. What sage response in gesture or thoughtful word could this president do or utter, to acknowledge this anger and pain, and transcend it? Bush needed to come up with a Barack Obama speech like the one the president elect delivered during the primaries to take the subject of racism beyond his mentor Rev. Wright’s racist hatemongering. Did Bush have it in him, after ducking the shoes, his own Obamanian phrase or two that would deftly deflect Arab peoples from shoe slapping Saddam statues as synonymous to shoe popping him?

Iraqi security guards beat and dragged al-Zaidi out of the room leaving a trail of blood. They closed the doors of the press room and continued to pummel the man outside who had survived being a hostage of Iraqi Shia terrorists a year before. Witnesses outside reported that the guards took his cell phone and used it to threaten al-Zaidi’s family.

You could hear his screams beyond the door as Bush, smirking and bobbing his head at the podium collected himself and quipped, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves.” Then he grinned and added, “If you want the facts, it was a size 10 shoe that he threw.”

He further off-handedly trivialized the incident afterwards in interviews adding: “I don’t know what the guy’s cause is… I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by it.”

“The guy wanted to get on TV and he did.” (Chuckle, wink, smirk).

Thus spoke a candidate for Nostradamus’ Antichrist. He is among the most prominent candidates, including Saddam Hussein (Antichrist as the classic Stalinist-Hitlerian dictator), Usama bin Laden (Antichrist as the religious extremist) and then there’s George Bush.

In a chapter on Bush for my newest digital book Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named: MABUS, I wrote the following:

“If, and I stress again, ‘if’ Bush is indeed the Third Antichrist then he will contribute a new attribute, or the crystallization of a kind of evil unanticipated. The signs of this are again divulged by a deeper understanding of the anagram MABUS. Some of my readers have pointed out that Mabus rhymes with the French ma buse, meaning ‘my blockhead’ or ‘my dolt.’ Arabic television news networks, such as al-Jazeera, coming out of the Middle East would allow many a straight-faced news anchor man or woman to address Bush as President abush. I am told it means ‘idiot’ in Arabic. Nostradamus certainly was French and his prophecies evidence a working understanding of Arabic. He also loved to lace his prophecies with wicked puns. Perhaps the term Mabus implies that the Third Antichrist is evil incarnate as an idiot brandishing ultimate power. He’s akin to a wooden-headed puppet of Nostradamus’ day, like Punch and Judy, his strings pulled by other invisible political forces, puppeteers.”

John Hogue
(16 December 2008)

Adi Da Samraj. Photo source: www.kheper.net/topics/gurus/Da.htm

Friends
Here are more of your comments and my answers to Adi Da’s passing. Robert wrote:

“Thank you John. Both Bubba and Osho embodied the best of the wisdom tradition, and I see you bringing us the core message. Live on!”

MY ANSWER:

It is about what is “core” in us. Osho coined the term “Noah’s Ark of Consciousness” back in the early 1980s. Way back then he accurately foresaw the crisis filled times we are in. He saw these things happening sooner than they have. He thought we’d be in the middle of ecological crisis, melting glaciers, heating up climate and many wars, some of them ending in nuclear explosions in what he called the “Nightmarish Nineties.”

Sometimes our free will in the present can modify and delay a collectively predictable momentum of destiny. So dating an event can be off by a decade or more.

Back in 1999, for the book Messiahs: the Vision and Prophecies for the Second Coming, I explained Osho’s concept of a new Ark:

“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 mother ship 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 coming times.”

***

The next writer, “Michelle,” was the first to make me aware that Adi Da had left his body. Many of you ask what the prophetic significance of this is. Adi Da is the last physically living member of a special group of rebellious spiritual prophets who I call sages of Homo Novus — the chief prophets sharing a collective vision of the advent of a New Man, a new Humanity, born out of the travails of this century, in which we have just entered. They were G. I. Gurdfjieff (1866?-1949), J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986), Osho (1931-1990) and finally Adi Da Samraj (1939-2008). This New Humanity is not some ectoplasmic gaggle of Walk-in, or blissful invasion of Indigo child changelings among us. This new humanity is our humanity, inside each of us. In seed form. Suppressed under the tyranny of societal imposed conditioning from birth onwards that I define in Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named MABUS as “The Antichrist Unconscious.”

I wanted to share Michelle’s letter with you all. She is a devotee of Adi Da and her words eloquently frame what many Adi Da lovers are going through. In the mystic East, the Master-Disciple relationship is regarded as the highest form of human love. Her words reflect this love well, at the parting of this highest of loves from the mortal coil, coming as they do from meditation’s silent center of the cyclone of gathering forces of unconsciousness that might suppress again that light:

“I read your blog, yesterday, entitled, Nostradamus and Gurus Leaving the Body. Thank you, and I need to update and note to you about my Guru, Adi Da Samraj’s Mahasamadhi. It has been determined by devotees living in Naitauba that He died of natural causes, so actually, heart attack was not what happened there, although it may have seemed like it had indeed occurred, and initially was presumed as such, by devotees. But it had not.

“Also, in regard to which direction Adi Da was buried/facing, at death, it was West. He was facing West. And, of course, too, He was born in the West.

“Very, very interesting writings and possibilities abound, indeed, as to the many threads and connections between Osho and the current crisis in Mumbai and of India/Pakistan relations, at the moment.

“I was also reflecting over what you write of Osho’s passing and Mahasamadhi, in 1990 and of the immense importance of unity for, and of, the earth and all life. There has been so much seeding and harvesting of hatreds and deceit and corruption. But now all of that hatred seems to be inviting itself to the world table, so to speak, and what will we all do about that?

“It occurred to me, that, it comes down to what we are ready and willing to grow and harvest, in ourselves: A new global understanding and energy, or else a continued battle for utopia, resources, and grabbing and getting back at systems, policies, and resources that don’t seem to support the world and its people.

“And then I thought about what you mentioned, about immortality — and I couldn’t help but consider the potential new world of the future, where, if this world remained united, for real, and grew its strength from that unity — spiritual and otherwise, that perhaps, in a newer sense, this new energy of the future would one day keep the world’s resources in place, given the intense energy and spiritual sacrifice and sadhana required to maintain it.

“Perhaps then, humankind would not require oil or coal or electricity to survive, but ingenuity, healing, spiritual insight, and just pure energy — pure love. Maybe this will be the energy wave and need and food, then, of the future:
Pure Love.”

***

A more extensive account of Osho’s Mahasamadhi, as his doctor, Swami Amrito, witnessed it, will be the subject of the next installment of reflections about Adi Da’s passing.

John Hogue

(13 December 2008)