Media hyperbole in images of Nostradamus has him getting his freak on in his secret study in ways that would have created thunders alerting »»]]>

Media hyperbole in images of Nostradamus has him getting his freak on in his secret study in ways that would have created thunders alerting the neighbors and the Inquisition, such as playing with lightning. ZAP! Whatever he was doing in his study, he kept it quiet. One thing this image accidentally gets right is Nostradamus' outfit. We ever see actors playing Nostradamus all laced up in 16th-century costumes, tights and three-cornered caps during scenes of his magic demonstrations on TV documentaries. The prophet NEVER wore his street clothes while doing magic ceremonies. He wore a gray or white hooded robe, like a neo-Platonist theurgist from the 2nd century C.E. I have informed every documentary director of this in pre-production. I have yet to see one listen, though I am ever optimistic.

Friends,
Wild weather increasing. Uncertain futures sending populations of unemployed flummoxing as they hit the impervious Wall Street. I see PIIGGS flying from financial accountability as they and the future of European monetary union may hit the fan this coming weekend. The German parliament vote on whether or not to throw more good billions into the economic Hades hole that is the bailout of irrepressible infantile-fiscal, irresponsible Greece. Global stock markets waver in waiting to see if rumors of Europe’s biggest economy will actually abandon the euro, leave Greece to its katástrephein mess and let the rumor of Germany’s return to Der Deutschmark hit the mark.

Over the channel, Britain is left hanging by a hung parliament. David Cameron is in bed with Nick Clegg. That is, the new conservative Tory prime minister forms a tentative coalition government with politically strange bedfellows like the leader of the very Liberal Democratic Party. (I don’t know about you but don’t those two look like congenital twins? Clones? I can’t tell who’s who. Can the British people?)

After crossing the channel to Number 10 Downing Street, let us cross the Atlantic again to pig wallowing Wall Street losing -376.36 points today.  Wait, can  your New York bound passenger jet dodge the ash cloud belching once again from Iceland’s little volcano with the big Viking name with lots of gas and ash to spare. US Jobless economic recoveries rebound as another 400,000 requests for unemployment checks this week resound.

Way down South in the land of cotton balls staunching orange hydrocarbon goo, old BP’s ecological disaster is not forgotten. BP execs search for tennis balls and tires to butt plug a leaky oil pipe, whilst a loop current in the Gulf of Mexico takes their oil slick, born back one month ago on Hitler’s birthday (20 April) and now the size of the state of Pennsylvania, to catch a ride on the Gulf Stream express around Florida. It will eventually deposit souvenir tar turds from the white sandy beaches of Miami all the way up the Atlantic seaboard to golden beaches of Cape Cod, perhaps even all the way across the ocean to lay orange gelatinous spaghettio-so-rude crude balls on gravel beaches in Cornwall.

The Grand Ole Opry opens its doors to the globally warmed and flooding Cumberland River and becomes the area’s newest fresh water-and-mud aquarium while the rest of downtown Nashville auditions for America’s newest “Katrina-ed in the drink” city since the other American music capital, New Orleans, lost its levies.

From hung parliaments in badly banked Great Iceland (oops I mean Great Britain), we see US midterm election primaries pitchfork in purges incumbents from all parties — mad hatter tea bagger, dumbopublican and donkeycrat. And if all the above was not enough, there is 2012 around the corner punctuated with one ominous documentary after another on TV pitting dueling special effects labs trying to one-up and jack-up the apocalyptical mood sexing up the talking head experts with gesticulating arms getting wilder — middle-aged torsos getting wider — with each new doomsday docu. punch in the potato coucher’s gut.

Each new installment ends all the Nostra-sturm-us and doomsday-drang with a platitude or two about how we can stop destiny’s train from derailing almost as an afterthought as you sit cowering in your couch — a most uncomforted potato. Many of you are left yelling at your TV that $2,012 dollar question that closes Sarah’s letter and finishes my seven-part reply about the Media’s Mask of Nostradamus.

Sarah is someone who does her bit to recycle and lower her carbon footprint while her neighbors blithely bung up the earth with their wasteful ways. Sarah gives a damn about our future, who, back in mid-March, had a young daughter innocently contemplating her blocks on the living room floor in the lurid TV glow of Nostradamus: 2012. After two-hours of generally one-sided SFX flickering, ruminating pundits fulminating Wagnerian doom in all the fuss and Meso-American shamanic feathers of Mayan Calendar end time, came a feeble post statement at the end brings hope that we can turn doom aside and live happily every after. Well ladies and gentlemen, Sarah just doesn’t buy that hopeful punctuation to an altogether frightening two-hours of TV.

For my part, she is absolutely right to ask the following and get an answer from at least one of those middle-aged talking torso-to-heads pundits of prophecy:

SARAH
What am I–a citizen of the word– Supposed to do? Try to get my states politicians to listen? Recycle my Styrofoam? WHAT? Besides scaring me and making me upset to the point my stomach hurts, my throat feels dry, and I suspect I won’t be able to sleep for a while. If this is all inevitable, what is the point of all of this? Thanks for telling me now what!!!???!! I don’t know what all this doomsday stuff is supposed to do. I’m not religious, but I TRY to live my life to the fullest. I TRY to be good. I help when I can. Am I supposed to leave my daughter with her grandparents, drop out of school and devote my time to rebuilding a war torn country? What is it that I do now? With all of this info???? Because I feel hopeless and scared.

HOGUE
First off, question everything you see on television. Then, look inward and ask yourself, why does your mind so quickly embraces what you just saw as gospel? Why is it so easy to be seduced by fear? What has happened to faculties, un-accessed in this mind that can help you step back and review, to question, to doubt if this raging documentary is actually balanced?

Why do we rush to the emotional exit to cower disempowered and frightened rather than tarry a little longer to review, apply our reason to question? Why are we so ready to snap-react rather than take the time to study a provocation rather than run with it and ultimately get run over by it emotionally?

I will be 55 years old just a few days shy of the next Halloween. I have lived long enough to directly experience the slow and steady decline of education in America, the eclipse of parenting by human to parenting by television. A mind addiction of instant access, instant knowledge and instant gratification speeds us up like a kind of intellectual cocaine and we are all taking a drag up the nose.

I have lived long enough to experience a few generations of kids having their brains adversely wired. It is the darker consequence of growing up in this fast pace, television-nannied, computer game obsessive atmosphere, to think fast, like or hate fast, make slap-in-the-face impulse judgments at the cost of losing a facility to take time, to wait, slow down, look deeper — reflect, recall, and remember — to hold attention upon something said or seen.

I consider the advent of the computer, the Internet and its gift of immediate access potentially to everyone on the planet as great a blessing as atomic power. Splitting the atom was a beginning. Invention will eventually bring us fusion reactors that will light our world, restore the balance of nature because it will end our pollution by rewarding us with clean energy. Internet will connect the world and eventually bring humanity together. Interconnectedness will end war, poverty and other human ills because it will be so easy to access each other, share genius and solve our problems.

I am saying this about atomic power, yet a long time ago, I was once a seven-year-old (not many years older than Sarah’s child). I was walking home from my second grade class at Lincoln Elementary School in Redondo Beach, California, in October 1962, looking at my street, my home, my friends and family mindful at all too-early an age that at any moment the Cuban Missile Crisis could destroy the world and everyone I loved. Atomic power scared me to death.

What can light the world can end it. What can bring interconnectedness to the world can also turn the human mind into a reactive, attention deficit disordered, technologically sophisticated but morally infantile instrument of a future corporate dictatorship.

I think now of that child contemplating her toy blocks in the television glow of Nostradamus: 2012. I think of her young mother, a 27-year-old, sitting silently in utter anguish so easily upset and willing to believe whatever the boob tube is spewing. She watches a few seconds of someone like me on the screen, duped by a fast and unconsciously paced, instant and shallow media saturated world that all I have to say on TV had been said in a second or two about Nostradamus and 2012. Sarah never read a book of mine. She was yet to read merely one of a thousand articles available and make her snap judgments, scaring herself further. Where has gone moderation of mind? Where has fallen the moderator in Sarah?

I say it again because our attention spans are getting shorter every moment: What can bring interconnectedness to the world can also turn the human mind into a reactive, attention deficit disordered, technologically sophisticated but morally infantile instrument of a future corporate dictatorship.

The Gospel according to our new god, the media in all of its hydra-necked outlets: television, DVD, computer games, internet, the cell phone, the iPodding iPad and so on can render me into a frightening mask because fear sells and modern minds are hot wired to quick reaction rather than patient reflection. It is not Internet or atomic power’s fault

These inventions from splitting atoms to iPod are neutral blessings born from our genius. How we use them to enlighten or en-frighten ourselves is dependent on our souls being the master of our minds, not the slaves of our minds.

These minds we have been given at birth are constantly imprinted with identity, and borrowed knowledge, morality and dirtied with the planted habits that are the very engine making us repeat the past and call it the future.

Every generation unconsciously passing to their children the seeded automatic behaviors implanted in turn make prophecy viable because every fresh and newborn child is essentially not trained to retain their soul memory but to bury it under a shell of ego. We were all children of innocence turned into personality. We wear our society’s birth-given masks — Western, Eastern, religious or agnostic — and clothe ourselves in the moralities in fad in our day.

The television is no more my enemy than the atomic atom. My conditioned mind filters and warps the use of these inventions, turning them into something bad.

You are the problem, Sarah, not Nostradamus: 2012.

You are the victim of your mind’s programming. It gives power to the things that scare you, not the power to look beyond fear’s filter.

These are the things I say on film in over 100 television shows that never get to you, because it neither fits with the fright entertainment industry nor the modern audience’s shallow-to-quick-judging, hot wired mindsets. That is why I hope something in my presence, my eyes, or the remaining fragments of what I had enlarged upon in my cut down statements seen in little bit bytes on TV are enough to direct you to venture further beyond the media’s television mask of “John Hogue.”

Once you take that jump, Sarah, and the rest of you, it is your response “ability” to understand how you have been hot wired to impatient snap judgment. Do not carry a boob-tubed bob-tailed mindset into my blogsphere and draw a conclusion on what I am all about by reading just one article. Slow down. Breathe. Reflect. Go build blocks with your child and remember your innocence, Sarah. Rediscover your innocence, everybody. Then come back to the issue at hand meditatively.

There is an ancient Native American saying: when life and times speed up outside becoming more crazy and hectic, you seek to slow down inside, becoming more inwardly calm, serene and aware with understanding.

You are much more than this filtering mind dazzled by the TV. You existed before this mind was born to be brain-dirtied. You exist even now under its spell. If you can exist in awareness of this deeper and abiding existence, here and now, the brain can be washed clean again so that your birth given love and genius can use it rather than let society taint it so that you can be used by society.

You are existence itself. The mind is merely your temporary servant during this visit embodied upon the beautiful earth.

Access this living light of existence and if you do, you will no longer be afraid of things on the television.

Earthquakes may accelerate. The world’s climate may be heating up. None of this can be directly healed or stopped by you. What you can stop is the caging of the soul by the programmed mind. If your light is relit, and your birthright of existent freedom unbound. If light, love and bliss can again flow, it is enough.

Worlds may rise and fall but you are existence. Forever.

Individual transformation of just you is enough. If enough individuals around the world rediscover their lost light of innocence and bliss… OK, fine. If that somehow saves the world… OK, whatever. Salvation of the world is merely a byproduct of individual transformation. Not something to seek. You alone are a whole world in microcosm that can be directly transformed. You can transform that world.

In the Millennium Book of Prophecy, I told the following story:

There’s an old Eastern tale: God is sick and tired of listening to all of bleeding humanity’s prayers. He tells the devil that he’d love to dash it all and hide somewhere on the farthest star.

“They will find you with time,” says the devil, “and as you know, you have all of eternity so it won’t be long before they catch hold of you again.”

“Not to worry,” the devil continues, “I have a simple remedy. Just hide yourself right behind their eyes. They will never look for you there.”

I would like to give you this key, this realization, as something to test for yourself: that you, me, all of us, are the problem. The problem is not outside of us. And, since we are the problem we can change right here and now. No need for outside influences to change or for dark ages to go all golden. No need to wait for harmonic convergence or doom in 2012. Eternity is only in the NOW. It is not influenced from the future or the past. Eternity is not marked on any calendar.

Where else can real harmony converge but right now?

There is nothing needed from outside of you right now, like a cosmic conjunction of the solar system with the center of the Milky Way or a Mayan Calendar set to “ding” on 21 December 2012.

That is the obsession of ding-dongs.

You have this present moment of harmonic convergence — always for instant access.

There are techniques of meditation that can help prepare the way to being a living “answer” beyond the world’s problems. If as a byproduct, all problems in this world should vanish or the world itself should vanish, so be it, with blissful blessing. Become only the Answer. Then live each moment as Answer.

If anything I have said in this series resonates with you, Sarah, or with anyone who has, is, and will read it, know that my invitation is ever open to share with you meditation techniques that have helped me try to become an “answer.” Just say the word in an email, and the only gift of true value, beyond all words and thoughts, can be happily given. With this offer, I close my series on the Media’s Mask of Nostradamus.

John Hogue

(20 May 2010)

RED ALERT–North and South Korea. Are they on the brink of war? A North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean’s corvette warship Cheonan back in March 2010. The South Korean War Ministry presented parts of the torpedo to the world today as evidence of a long and painstaking inquiry. They report it to be parts of the kind of near target detonation torpedo widely used by North Korean submarines using the shock wave of an underwater explosion below the keel to spit a ship in two. The torpedo parts were uncovered only five days ago in a 5-week search and recovery of the Cheonan and 46 of its drowned crew.

North Korean propaganda ministry's suped up photo of the North Korean Army on combat training exercise. Military buff or bluff?

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has promised to take “stern action. A Pyongyang defense spokesman said North Korea would “respond to [a] reckless counter-measure with an all-out war of justice!”

This might be a good time to review my bulletin posted in June 2009 concerning the possibility of a future Korean War, click on North Korea torpedo.

One of the watercolor illustrations attributed to Nostradamus in the purported Lost Book of Nostradamus, portrayed in Nostradamus: 2012. Vincent Bridges and Jay Weidner »»]]>

One of the watercolor illustrations attributed to Nostradamus in the purported Lost Book of Nostradamus, portrayed in Nostradamus: 2012. Vincent Bridges and Jay Weidner see this as the Two Towers of the World Trade Center, destroyed by terrorists in 2001. I do not see two towers, do you? Maybe it is just a castle keep on fire.

Friends,
We return again to Sarah’s letter: The moment when a lifetime desire to heal and save this planet collided with the television media’s generally sensational and fear-mongering presentation of our future options. In the middle of that nightmare, I often appear for my all-too-clipped winged and out-of-context video and sound bytes.

Why do I let myself be twisted to serve another misunderstanding person’s TV nightmare script? That is what Sarah’s visceral reaction begs me to answer in her letter, when History Channel’s two-hour documentary Nostradamus 2012 left her frightened for her child’s future:

SARAH
Today I watched the show you were in on the History Channel. In front of me, sat my daughter carefully examining her blocks.

I felt overwhelmed with sadness/panic/fear — despair. The show tried to end leaving me feeling hopeful, but I felt…. I can’t put it into words. But hopeful is NOT the word.

HOGUE
Every time I am invited to do a documentary I advise the producers and directors what not to repeat in previous shows, because I have been in just about every one made since the world got interested in prophecy in the late 1980s as the new millennium approached.

I tell them what you want to see. Not just a frightening litany of the dark possibilities of the future but also the light and wonderful alternatives.

I have given my readers those alternatives in 16 books and counting since 1987.

In Millennium Book of Prophecy, I present 777 predictions from over 100 seers throughout history. The first half of the book listed their collective visions of doomsday. The second contradicted the first offering up prophecies of “bloomsday” for the human race. In that vision there is Homo Novus (the New Man). He and she will bring a golden age to this world after understanding surmounts the travails of this century.

You are those new human beings in seed. A seed needs the right soil, air and water — the right loving teaching and teachers. In books like Messiahs, I presented visions of that new humanity and how we will grow the seed of their potential right here and right now. They will be born among us — they “are” us. We seeds of divine potential need only the right nourishment for that love and consciousness to bloom.

It is a pity this topic has not reached your eyes and ears on television. You can find it covered in my works if you but look for them beyond the boob tube. Get out of the television’s face and look beyond the “instant-hogue-caffeinated” spots dotting the TV documentaries.

Sarah continues, explaining how scary TV fits with her brother’s cynical and baleful view of the future.

SARAH
My brother is ALWAYS going on about these types of things. He often uses words like “they” or “we” But I don’t know who “they” or “we” are. I think he means the government, and the people. The government isn’t doing anything, and the people just keep messing things up, or vice versa.

In all honesty, the earthquakes lately have me very freaked out. So, after seeing the show, I searched for Nostradamus and Haiti and found this blog. I read through it to this page.

You keep telling of these terrible things to come.

HOGUE
Watching Nostradamus: 2012 left you terrified for the future. That means on some level you bought without question what guests like Vincent Bridges, Lawrence Joseph, John Petersen and Jay Weidner, said about the Mayan Calendar ending in 2012 as the real doomsday “end of days.” I would add that many of you were equally put off by most of the same experts enthusing that the winter solstice in 2012, lining up the earth, sun and center of the galaxy causing a Pollyanna, pie-in-the-sky-zapping shift in human collective higher consciousness is another New Age nut theory. I am currently working on an eBook on 2012 prophecies that will enlarge my critique of these theorists in detail along with providing actual prophecies that enlarge the time and scope far beyond the rather hysterical fixation on one year (2012) in a century of years coming, filled with upheaval and transformation of the planet and the human race.

According to Bridges and Weidner, Nostradamus predicts everything they can imagine. He even predicted doom or bloomsday in 2012 too.

Did you see them actually quote a passage from Nostradamus with 2012 written in it?

He was famous for setting down dates spanning his time in 1555 to 1999 and beyond — all the way to the year 3797 AD.

Why not write down “2012″ — this “most important” of dates.

All my direct statements about the 2012-Nostradamus connection and the Lost Book of Nostradamus were left out of the final cut.

I am sure the footage is archived. Hours of it. If History Channel would allow the production company it hired to re-edit the show with my contrary points restored it would bring balance to the documentary. You would have seen me on camera make, albeit a little less bluntly, the following points:

What is the Nostradamus-2012 connection? Absolutely no direct connection is there.

In over 30 years of studying Nostradamus’ writings, I have never seen anything set down about 2012 in his writings. Furthermore, the current fixation on 2012 and the Mayan Calendar are blown out of prophetic proportion. It is one prophecy age cycle in a crowd rebooting in the next several decades.

The Lost Book of Nostradamus?

It is a bogus book. Nostradamus could not draw.

It is a fraud from the 17th century, relying heavily on symbolic Cathar paintings badly re-rendered from illustrations composed centuries before Nostradamus lived. In a more balanced version of the show you could have heard and seen me cast doubt and even dismantle all the projections Vincent Bridges and Jay Weidner spewed onto these spurious watercolor paintings in the book.

In my opinion, Bridges, Weidner and many others in the show, except for Rabbi Ariel bar Tzadok and Gregg Braden, got caught up in their imaginations playing a cloud gazing game. You see a giraffe or an elephant in a cloud. I see a dolphin. And so on. My experience says there is nothing in these altogether vague paintings that is prophecy concerning 2012. In other words, you can find 2012, or any other pet prophecy projection in these symbols. The images work like flypaper. Flypaper for the projecting mind.

Sarah, I told them on camera that Nostradamus does not record the end of the world for nearly another 1,800 years. It was left out.

If the documentary really wanted to tie Nostradamus with end-of-days prophecy, the title should be Nostradamus: 3797 AD

I encourage History Channel to reissue a new version of Nostradamus: 2012. Let people see both sides of the 2012 controversy. The TV audience around the world is hungry for such a thing. It would be a huge success.

Part Five of this series is coming to a computer screen nearest you after next week’s special examination of the first five years of Pope Benedict XVI’s pontificacy, starting on the day he was crowned Bishop of Rome — 19 April, five years ago. Read more about Benedict’s prophetic significance here: Last Pope.

John Hogue

(16 April 2010)

PS—NATURAL DISASTERS KEEP ACCELERATING. My month ending blog on this subject will be rather long and detailed. Major earthquakes continue leveling towns flat like happened in Haiti. This time a 6.9 magnitude slamming the eastern-central region of the Himalayas this week. Pollen has become a new kind of smog in the American Southeast; fulfilling scientific predictions that global warming would visit upon us more powerful allergy seasons than ever before. Climatologists report March 2010 was the warmest month in world average temperatures since records of such were first recorded. Finally yet importantly, the volcanic eruption in Iceland has sent ash clouds across European airspace grounding all commercial air flights in England, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, France and Austria. This uptick in violent climate and natural disasters this year is a pre-taste of what is coming. You can see these prophecies in Predictions for 2010.

The painting exemplifies the spooky stereotypical portrayals of Nostradamus by all forms of sensational media posing as journalism. If Nostradamus where the African American, »»]]>

The painting exemplifies the spooky stereotypical portrayals of Nostradamus by all forms of sensational media posing as journalism. If Nostradamus where the African American, President Obama, this portrayal would be like a cartoon of Sambo. Even the crystal ball is profiling the prophet as some dime store mannequin soothsayer. Plunk your coin in the slot and get your fortune told by the wind-up dummy.

Friends,
As promised to Sarah and the rest of my blog community, here is the beginning of my point-by-point response to her cathartic letter about frightening prophecies milked by the media, and presumably, me, without detailing what one must do to prevent this future from happening.

SARAH,
John, I’m a 27-year-old. Graphic design student and new mom. I also live in the Pacific Northwest. I attend Portland State University. In all of my classes we discuss being “green”. There are lots of organizations and groups dedicated to being sustainable. I was required to take a class “environmental sustainability” last term. I learned many very scary facts about population control, and water quality. I felt very fearful of this planets demise.

HOGUE
The world of humanity has stepped into the uncharted territory of a new era, the global stage of human evolution. Now for the first time everything we do affects everyone else on the planet. We have entered this unique and challenging stage in our growth essentially following the habits of hunter-gatherers and early cultivators of prehistoric times. Like them, we regard this world of nature as an enemy to be tamed and conquered. In short, we have not evolved for hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, we change our technologies, our goddesses and gods, our religions and moral stances. They are masks of civilization affixed each century to the original face of the same old savage who once had to find a way to outbreed the other animals and outwit them, tame them, conquer them.

Well, we have won that battle. The war of survival of the fittest pitting humanity against the natural world is over. Yet we still go on breeding to abandon, usurping, raping, conquering Nature as if we were still that fragile band of a few thousand cave men and women in little tribes scattered across the wild natural world of immense and limitless resources.

It is not that world anymore.

We must snap out of this long sleepwalk of Neolithic dreamtime and become the Earth’s gardeners and guardians. We are the only animals evolving a potential of sentience to bring balance and harmony into our lives. All other animals can only breed and consume to their unconscious heart’s delight and let nature take its course. She will seek to restore the natural balance, cull the overpopulating critters and if need be bring upon them an extinction if they cannot adapt to her balancing act.

Human beings have this unique potential not shared by all other planetary animals to become their own guardians of nature. They have this god-goddess spark. They need only snap out of their habitual Paleolithic sleepwalks through history.

We enter a new millennium where this sleeper must awaken. We talking animals must become human, crystallize and awaken that potential of consciousness and love and bring ourselves into harmony. Otherwise, nature will — must — cull and eradicate us, as her mechanism so efficiently will do to other miscreant species.

I have collected thousands of predictions from all periods of prophetic forecasting and you would be amazed how they share the same collective warning about our times and how our disruption of the earth and its climate must end. Our abuse of this beautiful earth is the catalyst to our potentially doom-laden apocalyptic destiny. Yet, the challenge before us of global death can catalyze a human spark in all people. Cognizance on a global scale of the emergency can be enough to transcend insentient animal instincts and bring back to us, a golden future. That future has also been set before us by seers of all times and persuasions. You can see hundreds of positive prophecies about tomorrow in books under the following themes. See new age religion, Millennium prophecies, and Aquarian Age.

SARAH
Not until I had my daughter did I begin to feel almost terrified for what may happen in her life.

HOGUE
See this terror in a different light than what the mind is habitually programmed to frame in its acquired darkness. You did not have this mind before you were born, right? Not possible. You had to learn how to read and write English and take on labels like “American” etc. This all came after you were born. Be a witness to this mind that was trained by others to be terrified, or in other words, trained by others to push the “terrified” button when confronted with things you were taught to react for or against.

Take a deep breath, close your eyes. Take a step back into the being that was there before this mind was imprinted upon you. Step out of the darkness of your mind’s terror and see this so-called terror from some distance.

I used to be terrified by the future. Then I became a practitioner of the science of self-observation. Over time I came to understand that what my mind projected upon this energy you are feeling is not “terror” but “urgency.” Terror is negative and disempowering. Urgency is positive. It gives you energy to understand and act.

Society teaches us to be afraid rather than feel urgent. Urgency sees what lies before the human race is not terrifying. It is a challenge to grow and evolve. A mind imposed on us is afraid to grow because perhaps only the soul grows and the soul is not the mind, is it?

How can it be?

Where will this mind and its programmed brain go when we return to the bodiless state? Where was “Sarah” before you were born? Where will this “Sarah” go beyond death’s door? This brain you adopted at birth and had programmed and wired to think and react a certain way as a personality imposed on you by others is called “Sarah.” Imagine how different your soul’s personality mask would have been if you were born in Beijing, Mecca, or Banares instead.

This fear is an imposed interpretation on something else. Feel it instead as urgency to change, free of the mind’s projection to feel terrified. Then, new revelations and a fresh intelligence with which you were born will reawaken. Practicing the science of self-observation will help. I have many techniques I can offer you, if you but only ask for them. There are techniques I have learned that can help you face your fear and transmute it into urgency.

SARAH
In my household we made many changes. We use less water, we try to live sustainably.

HOGUE
This is wonderful and I commend you for it. I too do many things to lower my carbon footprint. Chief among these is helping my readers move from reading me in paper books made by cutting down forests of trees. I try to help them see how they can also lower their carbon footprint by reading my books made of photons and electrons. (See eBooks.)

I feel an urgency to live by my experience. Meditation teaches me that it is within my capacity to celebrate choosing freedom’s unique responsibility to live as I write. I light my own candle in the darkness and care not if a million candles remain dark. It is up to them to see that they too can put the light on. If seeing my candle lit helps that is secondary. What is more important is that my candle be lit and that it stays lit every moment, 24/7, waking or sleeping. It is enough that I be a watchman of my own light, sustaining it one eternal moment to the next.

I follow my own light, not the glowering light of the television’s false pictures. The points I made above are often given to these TV shows on film, yet they rarely reach you in the final cut.

In part three of this series we will talk about a theme most prophecy based TV shows censor out of my appearances: The first step to save the world can be the first step away from the problem’s source.

John Hogue

(27 March 2010)

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Hogue during his interview for History Channel's "Nostradamus 2012" inside the inner sanctum of the Masonic Lodge in San Antonio, Texas, in the summer of 2008.

Friends,
Some of you might have noticed a discussion going on at the bottom of the blog page entitled Natural Disasters, the Quickening in 2010 . I would like to share Sarah’s letter that opened the discussion because many of you who read my blogs or see me on television share many of the same feelings, have the same catharsis about it, and demand an answer.

Most of you have first come in contact with my work looking through the television mirror darkly. I appear for a few seconds and make some categorical statement. What I say and the image of my furry-owlish face is often insinuated between lurid and sensational latter-day, doom laden special effects in shows like Nostradamus 2012, the Next Nostradamus and my numerous appearances in the History Channel series, The Nostradamus Effect. I believe Sarah, like many of you, were watching a broadcast of Nostradamus: 2012 the other night might have something similar to say to me. Here is Sarah’s letter in its entirety followed by my initial response. (Please note this, Sarah and other readers. I have had to correct her punctuation and fill out the words she abbreviates because some of my readers are not yet versed in the new truncated, randomly punctuated and capitalized cyber-language now en vogue.) Here we go.

SARAH
John, I’m a 27-year-old. Graphic design student and new mom. I also live in the Pacific Northwest. I attend Portland State University. In all of my classes we discuss being “green”. There are lots of organizations and groups dedicated to being sustainable. I was required to take a class “environmental sustainability” last term. I learned many very scary facts about population control, and water quality. I felt very fearful of this planets demise. Not until I had my daughter did I begin to feel almost terrified for what may happen in her life. In my household we made many changes. We use less water, we try to live sustainably. But, even so, no one is perfect. Seeing neighbors being horrible to this earth makes my skin crawl. I try not to dig out of their trash and organize in into recycling bins.

Today I watched the show you were in on the history channel. In front of me, sat my daughter carefully examining her blocks.

I felt overwhelmed with sadness/panic/fear — despair. The show tried to end leaving me feeling hopeful, but I felt…. I can’t put it into words. But hopeful is NOT the word.

My brother is ALWAYS going on about these types of things. He often uses words like “they” or “we” But I don’t know who “they” or “we” are. I think he means the government, and the people. The government isn’t doing anything, and the people just keep messing things up, or vice versa.

In all honesty, the earthquakes lately have me very freaked out. So, after seeing the show, I searched for Nostradamus and Haiti and found this blog. I read through it to this page.

You keep telling of these terrible things to come.

What am I–a citizen of the word– Supposed to do? Try to get my states politicians to listen? Recycle my Styrofoam? WHAT?

Besides scaring me and making me upset to the point my stomach hurts, my throat feels dry, and I suspect I won’t be able to sleep for a while.

If this is all inevitable, what is the point of all of this? Thanks for telling me now what!!!???!!

I don’t know what all this doomsday stuff is supposed to do. I’m not religious, but I TRY to live my life to the fullest. I TRY to be good. I help when I can.

Am I supposed to leave my daughter with her grandparents, drop out of school and devote my time to rebuilding a war torn country?

What is it that I do now? With all of this info????

Because I feel hopeless and scared.

HOGUE:
Sarah, I am in receipt of your letter and my heart goes out to you and your newborn daughter. What you have put in words is what many people feel. They deserve an answer.

I wish to answer each of your statements in detail. I hope you will allow me the time to do so, not only for you but to the many thousands out there who feel as you feel, need some kind of answer, some kind of suggested direction towards individually empowering a better future for you and your beloved ones. I will answer your letter as part of a blog. I do this so I can share that answer not only to you, but to so many who are in need of some response. I am obligated to clarify how my views of the future are misrepresented by the television machine that plucks the scary and sensational out of context without the alternatives that I always provide but often find cut out of the final show.

I would first say this: never trust anything you see or hear on TV. I give hours of interview time to these shows that end up mangled. You might ask why I do it and see my message warped. My answer is, I can only hope that people will do as you have done and step past the BS veil of television and ask me directly, what is my view on the future.

I wish to tell you and many more that answer. I hope to do that very soon. Please be patient. I am but one man, alone. I will answer your many rightful observations and your authentic catharsis as soon as I can.

***

In Part Two of this series I will begin to answer Sarah’s letter point by point as best I can.

John Hogue

(20 March 2010)

»»]]> Friends,
Here are more themes, predictions and today’s assessments of what I wrote in December and early January for my almanac of Predictions for 2009

Economic Recovery or a new Bubble?

PREDICTION
“A new president and administration in America must find a global solution that isn’t karma from the past running over our economic dogma projections about how to go back to bubble economies in the future. Sooner or later, Obama and his team will have to deliver novel and revolutionary ideas. Jump-starting the economy isn’t a new idea. It does not address the core cancers, the tumors of our bad business practices and habits that will bring on terminal depression in two years.

ASSESSMENT
Vast sums of money go a-trillion-ing into the financial banks and businesses, starting with Bush and continuing in a greater flood with the new President Obama to the tune of the national deficit reaching 1.8 Trillion dollars as we approach the end of the fiscal year in mid-September. Reports claim that the Obama administration and Federal Reserve spent around 130 billion bucks just in early August to at best slow down the bleeding. With such an ongoing spending spree it takes no Nostradamus to wager that by mid-September, the Obama administration will crash through the two trillion ceiling. What has been done to reform the bad practices turning back the clock to government oversight in the financial and housing markets? Next to nothing, as was predicted. The core cancers and tumors in the system are still there and so is the inflationary depression timeline ticking off unto late 2010 if we stay this dangerous course.

Economic Recovery did not come in the first six months of 2009

PREDICTION
“The consumption based economy will remain consumptive with TB (trade bust) for more than half the year and not what the experts who didn’t see this thing coming are hoping, that a turnaround is six months away.”

ASSESSMENT
Do not let bear market rallies fool you. Do not start playing Happy Days are Here Again CDs because some of your financial “CDs” are showing a modest improvement. Do not think that bankers paying back some of the stimulus are stimulating the economy with loans to small businesses that are making a real difference yet. Do not buy the bull market bunk that says modest growth in retail of a few percentiles is some turning of the tide; or, that unemployment requests going down a bit means people are going back to work. It means that their unemployment funds have maxed out in most cases and they are dropping off the ledgers.

Pundits want to put lipstick on the pig of a quarter million people losing their jobs in July being a sign that good times are coming because the bleed was a little less than expected. Heck! This is summer and summer time jobs make good lipstick statistics for this unique brand of recession. Wait until summertime ends and the lifeguards are out of a job. If this were a car, we could celebrate that the impetus of the crash through one wall after another is slowing down but the wreck has not come to a halt, let alone steering into turnaround. The housing market that started to freeze the brakes on the global economy is still dismal and in the next two years, half of all US homeowners will be drowning in debt payments higher than the original value of their houses for Christ and for-”closures” sake!

There is no turnaround in the first six months of 2009. Only the bleeding is slowing down. We may not see jobs, the real marker for recovery, reach a zero unemployment bleeding point for another year coming.

A dozen State Governments asking for Federal Handouts and outright Bailouts

PREDICTION
“A new breadline is lining up at the Capitol building of bankers, CEOs of credit card companies, automobile moguls flying down from heaven in Lear jets begging for bailouts. Next will come the governors of American states by the dozens.”

ASSESSMENT
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reports that up to 41 states are facing severe budget shortfalls for 2009. The governors of California and Florida may be at the head of the line holding out the largest hats panhandling the Feds for $31.7 billion (California) or $5.1 billion (Florida) but behind them are 39 more state governors trying to beg off their total $71.9 billion budget shortfall. Back three months ago, the CBPP reported the line of governors only at a “mere” 29. Then the state shortfalls were “only” $48 billion. Now 41 out of 50 US state governors are beseeching Washington for some money to cover what is now nearly a $72-billion budget shortfall and there is still a lot of 2009 left for more to join the bread line.

With that said, I posted the following for the book in December 2008:

2009–The Year of Bankruptcies

PREDICTION
“The year 2009 will be remembered as the year of state chapter 11 bankruptcies. Moreover, it is from your pocket, Mr. and Mrs. American taxpayer that daddy government’s hand will pilfer.”

ASSESSMENT
California, they say, leads in all trends. Where the fifth largest economy in the world goes, can the fates of lesser US states be far behind? After California, comes Florida, Michigan, Illinois and many other states facing bankruptcy protection in their near future, which, of course leads to:

A Plague of State Tax schemes

PREDICTION
“Read my lips, many new taxes to stop state government yard sales.”

ASSESSMENT
In my own State of Washington, where Governor Gregoire is forced to grovel in Washington for funds to cover a $6 billion deficit shortfall, the state government gets creative with traffic infractions, an increase in the liquor tax, and talk of other back door taxation schemes. I am sure there is a taxing story in all the other 49 states my readers could share.

A new dysfunctional Relationship between Frat Pac Economists bailed out by Taxpayers

PREDICTION
“The Bush administration leaves behind a government and economy ensnared in a co-dependent relationship that resembles his own behavior. The former frat brat kid famous for party binging, wrecking cars and bankrupting three oil research and drilling companies, always at the last hour got bailed out by his millionaire dad and daddy’s influential cronies appointed to high places. He leaves America with a frat brat kid economy gambling on speculation and spending well beyond its means, letting go the wheel of a crashing American auto industry, allowing the oil industries to overcharge then see prices collapse el Busto! through the floor.

“Hey! What me worry? Here comes my big daddy government with deep pockets full of taxpayer’s money ready to throw the brat a line of entitlement credit that kid economy takes for granted. The rakish brat economy knows it can progress to excess without consequence or oversight in the blind faith that when he squeals, big daddy government will bail him out.”

ASSESSMENT
The brats are bankers and Auto GM CEOs, and share holders and we the taxpayers must endure, to warp John Donne’s poem a bit, the “AIG-gues and tyrannies” of those elites at the top who when it comes to bailouts enjoy the following upgrade of Donne’s famous revelation at taxpayer’s expense:

No CEO is an Island, entirely unto himself,
Every investment banking man
Wants a piece of the big “con”-intent,
A slice from the federal fund main line,
Any man’s debt diminishes “thee”,
Because I am involved in bailing myself out.
And therefore never send to know for whom
The deficit tolls; it tolls for thee, taxpayer, not “me.”

Find out more about how we get out of this mess:

Predictions for 2009

John Hogue

(31 August 2009)

Friends, Readers and the press often ask me this question:

Would you tell us which one »»]]>

The execution of Louis XVI: Elected "Cap", bloody slicing

Friends,
Readers and the press often ask me this question:

Would you tell us which one of Nostradamus’ fulfilled predictions has impressed you the most?

My answer is, there are many. Hundreds in fact. Here’s one foretelling the unsuccessful attempted escape of Louis XVI and the royal family from the gathering threat of Revolutionary France. Nostradamus set down these details 235 years before it happened:

CENTURY 9 QUATRAIN 20 (Les Propheties)

De nuict viendra par la forest de(1) Reines,
Deux pars(2) vaultorte(3) Herne(4) la pierre blanche:
Le moine noir(5) en gris dedans Varennes,
Esleu(6) cap.(7) cause tempeste feu, sang tranche.

By night he will come by the forest of Reines,
A married couple, devious route, Queen white stone:
A monk-king in gray in Varennes,
Elected Cap, causes tempest, fire, and bloody slicing.

(1) Grammar error: forest de(s) Reines. (2) O.F. (Old French) pair, par, couple. (3) Compound word: O.F. volte, route, and tort, detour. (4) Anagram for Reine = Queen (Drop the H move the r = rene; add the i = reine.). (5) Anagram for roi (drop the n). (6) O.F. elevated, raised in rank and dignity. (7) Apocope for (Louis) Capet, i.e. Louis XVI.

On the night of 20 June 1791 the royal family, disguised as servants of Baroness de Korff, left Paris in a heavy covered carriage to journey north to the border and freedom. Traveling throughout the night and the next day, they arrived at the town of Varennes just before midnight in search of rest and refreshment. The town’s mayor, a man called Sauce, invited the weary travelers into his grocery store to take a glass of wine and, while they drank, he and his wife asked them about themselves and their journey. Sauce was suspicious of the couple — the nervous man dressed in a monklike gray hat and cloak and the woman who, although clad in a plain white dress, was betrayed by her manner and bearing as a lady of noble birth.

When an interested listener standing nearby recognized the royal couple, Sauce sent him to alert the town garrison. In desperation Marie Antoinette, tears streaking her face, begged Madame Sauce to let her family continue their journey. She was unmoved by the royal tears. “I love my King, but I love my husband as well and would not have him lose his head.” Louis and his family were returned to Paris as prisoners.

Over two centuries before this doomed escape attempt and its tragic consequences were played out, Nostradamus had foreseen it all.

This quatrain is startlingly accurate in every detail. It is numbered 20 after the date of the attempted escape — 20 June 1791. The royal family’s road to freedom took them past the forest of Reines but the coach was eventually forced, by the poor road and lack of replacement horses, to make a detour. Devious thus describes a detour, the secrecy and their disguise. Witnesses who reported seeing the pair during their escape described them as a married couple and Louis as a monk. The town of Varennes was the scene of their discovery. Queen white stone gives in only three words a perfect description of Marie Antoinette’s appearance and emotional state: She wore a white dress, and some said that shock and distress turned her hair white overnight. White stone could be a double-pun alluding to both her hardness of heart towards the lower classes and lack of personal warmth, and to the notorious diamond necklace scandal. Elected Cap, is Louis Capet, formerly the supreme ruler Louis XVI, now elected monarch of the new constitutional government (causes tempest), whose death will spark a counter-revolution that will be suppressed by the Republicans with the guillotine (bloody slicing).

Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies,
pp. 703-704.

John Hogue
(5 March 2009)

UPDATE: 01/23/10–Also check out:
Predictions for 2010

Nostradamus predictions