This is "Overpopulation" by John Pitre. I highly recommend you visit his web site and gallery of thought provoking, visionary art and social commentary »»]]>

This is "Overpopulation" by John Pitre. I highly recommend you visit his web site and gallery of thought provoking, visionary art and social commentary (http://www.johnpitre.com/). I remember seeing this painting in a head shop back in the late 1960s or early 1970s. His satire illustrating a world gone naked, famine-ridden, impoverished, overcrowding the continents compelled me to think about the dangers of overpopulation when I was in my teens.

Friends,
We can gauge to what extent we are fulfilling prophecies of humanity passing into a period of collective madness when a fundamentally right message is surrendered to and promoted by all the wrong, unbalanced people. As I write this James Lee, a frequent protester seen in front of the Maryland/Washington DC offices of Discovery Channel since 2008, today escalated his protest into a deadly hostage situation by storming the building with a gun and what appeared to be pipe bombs strapped to his torso.

Thanks to Internet access, the whole world watched and millions read Lee’s on-computer screen manifesto. In the last four hours he was alive, TV networks across the world filmed his web site and screen shot his message about saving the world and restoring its ecological balance. For a brief moment the whole world was watching and listening.

In Predictions for 2010, I warned the following would begin happening this year:

Be also advised of a new wild card in prophecy emerging around the world in earnest in 2010: an escalation of effective and often violent eco-terrorism.

James Lee is such an effective terrorist. A handgun, a satchel of suspicious containers and network cameras forced many of you to read the following extracts from his cry of help.

“The world needs TV shows that DEVELOP solutions to the problems that humans are causing, not stupefy the people into destroying the world. Not encouraging them to breed more environmentally harmful humans…

“You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation. Surely you MUST ALREADY KNOW this!”

This sick and desperate man violently brought the whole world’s attention to the essential cause of humanity’s future unsustainability: our inability to moderate our growing numbers which are soon to clear 7 billion resource-consuming and pollution creating souls overtaxing the planetary ecosystem. Lee gave violent voice to the source of Nostradamus’ grim warnings of an oncoming global famine in our future.

The threat of overpopulation is one of the hardest messages to get through to people who are for the most part under the biologically hypnotic drive to procreate. I had taken up this message 20 years ago and altered my life to back my words with action. What James Lee did was insane. He snapped and was perhaps appropriately gunned down. I have chosen to spread this message about birth control with hopefully a more meditative and sober approach.

Although this eco-terrorist criticizes Discovery Channel for not saying enough about the problem of Overpopulation, I would like to come to Discovery Channel’s defense and remind people that Discovery and its affiliates have been at the forefront of educating people with their “Planet Green” shows or brilliant documentaries about the coming ecological crises and needed solutions. I am grateful also that Discovery on occasion has allowed the broadcast of even a prophetic angle on this matter. I recall that in the recent Discovery documentary Nostradamus Decoded, I was allowed to discuss prophecies clearly forecasting an oncoming, unsustainable future if we do not control human population growth.

Discovery Channel IS putting this message out.

Mr. Lee’s rash act today has only snuffed out his life. As soon as his body hit the Discovery Channel office floor, the media cut the live feed and television illumination of his message was also cut, fading to black. Now there lies only the sad remains of a message: a deranged gunman is the only thing left to talk about.

The subject of human overpopulation can hopefully return now to more level headed men and women without the stigma of terrorism overshadowing it.

I began tackling the subject over 20 years ago when I updated the prophetic metaphor of St. John of Patmos‘ Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I created a new allegory suitable for modern times.

What follows is the short chapter about the trailblazing first of Four Hellriders. The essay was inspired by a choice made in 1990 and was published in 1994 in the Millennium Book of Prophecy.

***

The electric current in the surgical lamp at the Usha Nursing Home quivered ever so slightly, betraying the fact that this remarkable modern surgery room was situated somewhere in the energy-starved Third World. The twitching electrical glare displayed my fillet of testicle to the competent doctor. With the right apron string to biology and future children cut and the other about to go, the patient laying back on the operating table chose this moment to speak:

“Doctor?” I said with mock severity. “Doc!”

“Yes? Are you feeling any pain?”

“Doctor,” I pressed, not answering his question and putting on my best tone of concern, “You’ve got to tell me the truth — will I ever be able to play the violin again?”

The doctor and his nurse chuckled as they stitched and stanched and cut me loose from fatherhood. For a few weeks my testicles would have lingering pains of some form of primal biological mourning as they got acquainted with life without the ability to inject others with the needed spice for a womb’s brew of life.

I hobbled down the hospital hallway and stepped into the street.

A gritty, burned-out evening (typical of urban India) reeking of diesel exhaust, dung, and the spice of toasted banyan leaves, greeted me in the narrow, backed-up roads. My beloved Nadine [Satgyan] held my hand as we brushed aside a gaggle of street urchins whining for baksheesh (alms). We skirted through throngs of beggars at last reaching a cluster of rickshaws — those three-wheeled black and yellow beetles of the South Asian streets, nearly as numerous as that evening’s mosquitoes. Nadine tucked me inside the revving and coughing metal carapace, which drove this bruised-balled though biologically liberated author back to his hotel room.

Life is hard in the land of exploding birthrates. I had made friends with an earlier generation of street urchins on my first visit to India, ten years before I was sterilized. To my question, “What do you want out of life?” I was surprised to hear them say they wanted to get married and have children. Nine years and nearly two hundred million Indian babies later, I was seeing the effect of their pubescent desires as the rickshaw careened through an ocean of people trudging along under India’s dim and flickering street lights.

I cupped my bruised jewels to protect them; too many potholes break the suspension springs of rickshaws weaving through too many crowds, who do their best to uphold a democracy that suffers too many crushing debts to too many affluent (and sparsely populated) Western nations.

I rode home, glad that in a world becoming ever more crowded with suffering children destined to multiply the suffering, no child will enter this misery of scarce clean water, little food, little education and a lot of disease through my chance biological injections. Though I respect an individual’s choice to have children, I hold the conviction — and seal it with a surgeon’s scalpel — that at this time in history, there are already too many kids to love and too little love to give.

A famine of many dimensions exists. The majority of Earth’s children are starving from lack of love at a time when there is no lack of wombs being impregnated. And the logical conclusion was anticipated over four centuries ago. The prophet Nostradamus forewarns us of the result of overpropagation:

The great famine which I sense approaching will often turn [up] in various areas then become worldwide. It will be so vast and long lasting that they will grab roots from the trees and children from the breast.

This prophecy, made in the mid-sixteenth century, was number 67 in the first volume of his prophetic masterpiece, Les Propheties. In my first book, Nostradamus and the Millennium, I introduced a new theory that Nostradamus might have hidden some of his future dates within the numerical indexing of his over one thousand quatrains.

With this predilection to hide dates in the stanzas, the French seer might have intended quatrain 67 of Century 1 as the year 1967 inaugurating a future global famine. According to the Worldwatch Institute, the year 1967 did see grain production in Africa begin its current and disastrous decline, as well as one million Africans starve to death in the Biafran famine. Since then the world has seen an upsurge of hunger in various areas of Africa and Asia, where accelerating birthrates run mostly unchecked. Too many new consumers of food, fuel, and water devour steadily-decreasing harvests. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared in 1987 that with the birth of the five billionth child, we had already sewed our seed beyond the limit where Earth’s fragile ecosystem will not avoid reaping some degree of dire consequences in the early twenty-first century.

One can already hear the hoofbeats of Overpopulation, the First Hellrider of Doomsday. She personifies our uncontrollable urge to multiply human want and hunger to the point of disaster.

Three children are born every second, making a total of two hundred and fifty thousand new arrivals each day. The momentum of our rapid growth will add another billion mouths to feed and throats to quench between 1991 and 2001. That’s the equivalent of adding an extra China every twelve years. By the turn of the century global population will increase by a hundred million a year. The next billion will be added in eleven years (2011), the next in less than ten years (2020). By 2030, China by itself will require all the current grain exports of the world. By 2025, we will have to build a nuclear power plant every week to keep up with the energy demands of nearly a dozen billion people!

Our birthrate bullet train is heading for a wall called unsustainable food production. This is the point in our near future when an avalanche of new polluters exhaust our dwindling farmland until we cannot sustain even the illusion of nutritional subsistence for half the human race.

A few Third World governments who share the greatest burden of excessive propagation have begun national family planning campaigns, but even the hopeful signs of a slowing birthrate in countries like China and India may be little more than sparks flying off our brakes as our acceleration headlong into a collision with agricultural collapse seems unstoppable. The UN World Food Council in its 1988 report has all but admitted our defeat in the war against hunger and malnutrition. America, the breadbasket of the world, holds the key to sustainable food production and spreading the message of population awareness. The United States led the world in funding an international campaign for family planning until most financial support was withdrawn in 1987. If the program does not resume, many UN globe watchers think stabilization between the death rate and birth rate is not possible for the next hundred years.

By overpopulating their range, human beings create more demand on a dwindling supply; the equation for a future apocalypse by famine. America has seen its global exports of grain and other food staples drop steadily into the red since the late 1980s. If droughts continue to reduce the river of American grain to a trickle, the first decade of the next century could see the nightmare of Ethiopia played out across most of the nations of the developing world who depend on American exports. Food riots could be common in major cities like Cairo, Lagos, Caracas and even Tokyo and St. Petersburg, since they rely almost exclusively on the farmers of America for their daily bread.

The Hellrider of Overpopulation is the undisputed trailblazer for a tomorrow that will be terrifying because humankind is afraid to change its gestalt from being a pack of competing nationals to a confederation of sharing inter-nationals. Following right behind Overpopulation’s hoofs are the Hellriders of Earth Trauma, The Lemming Syndrome, and the Third World’s War.

Humankind has put off facing the many various symptoms of global hyperextension for so long that if any one catastrophic incident foretold by prophecy were fulfilled, it could trigger a domino effect of cascading crises that could overwhelm all the good efforts and newfound awareness of the need for global maintenance arising in the final decade of the twentieth century. What would happen if Los Angeles and Tokyo were devastated by earthquakes, as most seismologists expect to happen sometime in the next thirty years? The loss of Tokyo or LA alone is enough to bring on a severe financial depression. All progress in paying off the global deficit or financing a worldwide crusade against overpopulation could be lost in a few seconds of seismic catharsis. Skyrocketing food exports costs would climb out of reach of starving nations with little capital and a lot of debt. Famines would erupt throughout the Second and Third World, sending millions of refugees over sensitive borders. Regional and ethnic conflicts would increase, but with a new and frightening twist: many of these wars will be fought by developing nations with a new-found chemical and nuclear weapons capability.

American grain not only sustains the developing world but also the Second World, or former Communist bloc. What if American grain reserves ran out and all wheat and corn exports to Russia ceased? The second Russian revolution might fail if the new democrats or totalitarians to follow cannot forestall chronic crop failure and food shortages.

Rapid population growth is the chief source of food insecurity and social instability. The current lack of commitment by today’s political leaders of the early 1990s to pool together and fight an all-out war against overpopulation could still bring on the Third World War by the mid-to-late 1990s, or later in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

[A selection of collective visions about the potential for a global famine:]

In the years 1986-1998 Great famine will prevail not only in the United States, but in France, Japan, India, and China as well.

Irene Hughes (1981)

[At a time when there is a] great nation across the ocean that will be inhabited by peoples of different tribes and descent [America]…many nations will be scourged by want and famine.

St. Hildegard (c. 1141)

All public cult will be interrupted. A terrible and cruel famine will commence in the whole world and principally in the western regions, such as has never occurred since the world’s beginning.

João de Vatiguerro (thirteenth century)

By the end of this century…50 percent of the population has to die simply of hunger. And just think, if 50 percent of the people die, what will be the situation of the living ones? There will be nobody even to carry their corpses to the graveyard; they will be rotting in your streets, in your neighborhoods, even in your own house. The whole world will have become a vast graveyard stinking of death.

Osho (1987), The Razor’s Edge

[Author's Update: Clearly Irene Hughes's and Osho's timing for their visions are unrealistic; if, however, current trends in population increase remain unchanged Osho's vision could aptly describe the collapse of food and water sustainability in 2020-2050 when the planet will be burdened with an estimated eight to twelve billion people.]

How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers.

Y’shua (a.d. 30-33), Mt 24:19

***

Reading this chapter again after so many years gone by, I am struck by how its points have become more topical to our present times and near future. If you want to read more about the other Hellirders of the Apocalypse, each has their full chapter in The Millennium Book of Prophecy. This book looks at 777 prophecies from over 200 sources, ancient and modern. It is split into two halves. In the first half I use a preponderance of collectively shared visions to argue how doomsday is unavoidable. In the second half I used collective prophecy to contradict this premise. Indeed, we do have a choice and a better future forecasted — often by the same prophets. There is a choice. From doomsday we can change the future to a “blooms”-day, the flowering of a golden age. This message does not need a gun, it needs understanding, compassion and love to be heard and acted upon.

John Hogue

(01 September 2010)

Osho.

Friends, First, a few words about “the Great Lie.”

Hitler in Mein Kampf freely shares his secrets on how he would seduce a people »»]]>

Osho.

Friends,
First, a few words about “the Great Lie.”

Hitler in Mein Kampf freely shares his secrets on how he would seduce a people to adopt his intolerant vision with their eyes wide open. Keep your propaganda simple, and if the lie is brazen — lie big, because as Hitler accurately forecast, “Only a big lie succeeds in politics!”

Hitler before he committed suicide in his bunker in 1945 foresaw the return of Fascism. If that was more than the vain hope of a dying madman it will succeed because people of the present and the near future adopt his fundamental political device.

Tell a lie as the truth and keep telling it until it becomes a hypnotic suggestion.

Tell a lie like Newt Gingrich let slip in an interview on Fox last week that all Muslims are synonymous with Nazis, or foment and follow that popular right wing suggestion that “Obama is a Muslim.”

Tell these lies frequently and with time we will see more and more people believe it as we are seeing today in America. Use then this rote lie to undermine fact, undermine truth. Undermine the world.

***

The above was a hard thing to say but it must be said. Said and balanced by alternatives. Bitter beginnings are a blessing, because they can lead to sweet endings.

I offer the final installment of the Path of Trust Series, taken from my book Messiahs. I have only altered the opening (see brackets) to cover an important milestone approaching in my spiritual life.

[October 15 is not only Nietzsche's birthday but it is my birthday. My second birthday, actually. A new birth. On that day, seven weeks and four days from this posting it will be 30 years-and-counting that I met Osho in India. I've been testing his] experiments, and I haven’t really figured out anything. In the beginning I had many questions. When my master responded, he didn’t answer them as such; it was as if he made my questions vanish. Over time the clouds of questions slowly disappeared and left behind just a sky made of answer.

Not all of his hypotheses agreed with me, but that was not a problem. My master always encouraged me to follow my own way, to celebrate being as equally unique a human being as he was. If something didn’t work, it only meant that we still needed to find techniques in meditation or therapies that harmonized with my individuality. The essential hypothesis he suggested to me was that ultimately existence itself is the teacher.

Life is the master.

When I also discovered this through my own experimentation, I began to see the master’s sutures of insight slowly become my own.

Thus I begin to understand the second step a disciple takes with a master. You begin to experience union with him or her. In the beginning you fall into a rhythm with the master as your most cherished beloved, but it is not a romantic affair of soul mates. The one-on-one coupling I’ve shared with women in this life, as rich and fulfilling as it has been, is nothing compared to the disciple-master relationship. It is one-ego-on-no-ego. It is one I-diot in love with a Nobody. It is a one-on-zero affair. You are somebody. You are trying to be something whereas the master is a no-thing being. And there’s the mysterious paradox. He is full of this emptiness, he is a monsoon cloud bursting with rain, and like rain his emptiness nourishes a thirsty soul. Even the pitter-patter of his showers on the roof of your resistance is comforting to you.

Osho at 21 shortly after his enlighenment.

The master is an empty void that has a bright awareness about it. You feel that he has arrived. Yet he is a vacant, non-present presence. A body walks up to you and talks to you. A man dances with you but even though the body is total and animated in its moves, it appears just as empty as a corpse. You dance with him and become aware that this corpse is far more alive than you. It is as if the sky decided one day to hide inside the shell of a human body so it could relate to you and love you. The only hint of the sky’s masquerade is the bright and penetrating emptiness of his eyes.

You find yourself falling in love with zero. It is like the legend of the great lovers, Tristan and Isolde. They adored each other with such intensity that they both disappeared into that love. They became so aware of love that they became love. Love liberated them from being egos, from being limited in time or confined in sexually identified minds and bodies. They became love’s eternity, love’s endless sky. In the same way, staying close to a master you begin to disappear into his state of union and non-separation. Tasting his no-thing-ness, your starved soul begins to become wet with his nectar. Once this has happened, once the master gets his emptiness under your skin, his physical existence becomes irrelevant. The sky was not the body. It was just visiting you. You are not the body either. In those moments when the master merged with you, he showed you that you are also the sky hiding behind form.

To merge with a master is called Satsang. There is no appropriate translation in any Western language for this Sanskrit word. I can say this, from my own experience: Satsang happens when you come close to a master, so close that his emptiness helps you to dissolve into “it.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, you disappear into his whole in the clouds. The mind and all its thoughts fall away; the emotions and all their turbulence of hurts and expectations vanishes. You become light and lightning-bright with the same focusless attention of the master. Satsang is a coupling. He has disappeared and so have you. For a moment there is no master, no disciple. No-thing.

At this juncture prose must be left behind. The language of books is a language of the clouds, of the idiots; its expression is extraordinary. Language separates, distinguishes. Words and sentences are like Tristan-and-Isolde egos before they dissolved into no-ego. Language dissects the flower of a master-disciple union into its parts. Language divides and dismantles the mystic flower of Satsang until it lies in pieces on the floor, killed. The only way to understand what I’m saying is to find a master, sit with him or her and disappear into his love and awareness.

A look with no intention.
A robe of green, fluttering,
Like a poplar tree sage in a desert.

A moonlight leaf,
Causing the cockerel to purr in the almond tree.
The hum held in your hands,
The eyes wide open gazing backwards
At something beyond the seen:

The one you recognize in me.

A rocking moves my frame from nowhere,
And meeting draws closed our eyes.
And you never saw me.
And I never saw you.

So that we could re-member.

Through moments of Satsang with my master I have tasted the essence of the Apocalypse [Revelation] of the Awakened Ones. As far as I understand it, this is one of their secrets: No messiah as such is coming to save us. The savior sleeps within each of us.

Worship not the awakened mystics. Understand them as the reflections of your own divine potential. Their physical sojourn on this earth is an invitation to ignite the fire of your sleeping consciousness. To indicate this truth, they led you from the periphery of the outer apocalypse to the untapped majesty hiding within self.

Messiahs, pp. 222-223

John Hogue

(23 August 2010)

PS — Osho is gone from his body just over 20 years now. In that passing was a last barrier removed. Now, like this morning, sitting behind my house on an incomparable late summer day, I experience no barrier, no loss, no limit. The Zero I knew embodied that even then was already “gone” is already not-there-ing with me now. You too can have this experience. It is never too early or too late because this very special love is beyond time. If you feel a calling, I can provide directions on the way. Just Contact Me.

Osho.

Friends, Five hundred fires across drought-stricken Russia burn a failing wheat crop while a monsoon flood displaces 14 million Pakistanis. The monsoon has »»]]>

Osho.

Friends,
Five hundred fires across drought-stricken Russia burn a failing wheat crop while a monsoon flood displaces 14 million Pakistanis. The monsoon has at least two more months of downpours to wring from tempestial skies. The drought in Russia will also continue into October if what the Boulder Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research says is correct and Russia’s drought is linked to the powerful climate engine of monsoons in South Asia growing wetter and more extreme. The NCAR reports that a 2 degree Fahrenheit rise in the Northern Indian Ocean since the early 1970s has juiced up the monsoon low-pressure storms that by consequence strengthen drier and stationary high pressure centers over Russia and Siberia.

Back in Part Two of The Path of Trust, we looked at the poetic, ancient meaning for the Sanskrit word Guru. It depicted a spiritual teacher as someone full of love like thunderclouds in a monsoon swollen with rain that cannot contain it. The Guru in an over abundance of monsoon bliss must let “its” sky open wide to drench all, whether gales of compassion should nourish the starving soil seeking new inner growth or fall upon insentient rocks and the opened umbrellas of sterile hearts.

What is happening across Pakistan and South Asia is the antithesis of this metaphor. The dried mind of collective human egoism is unconsciousness incarnate, heating up the climate with its pollution, raising ocean temperatures that feed more ferocious weather phenomena of deluge and drought not seen in living memory.

The Guru of enlightenment’s silent thundering and choiceless release of love may be the remedy. Here then is a somewhat autobiographical overview of my own guru experiences taken from my book Messiahs. The guru that showered upon me helped me walk upon the path of trust down within my own inner truth in two steps. In step one, the Guru first becomes your deprogrammer then your inspiration to experiment on your own.

***

Real trust has no conditions attached. A real guru is an inspiration, not an enslaver. He nurtures a trust in experimentation, rather than nourishing your blind belief. An authentic master won’t give you a belief to follow. A messiah like Adolf Hitler demands blind belief. A real master strives to make you aware of many unconscious pathologies that keep you unblissfully unaware of your true nature. You know you are in the presence of a real guru when you find all your expectations exposed while living with him. If you don’t let them go they will be, figuratively speaking, rubbed in your face.

Usually incidents with other disciples reveal your ego trips in the day-to-day affairs of life in the master’s spiritual community. At the same time a real ashram also gives you a safe haven to go through often painful revelations, because you can see you are not alone. Everyone has their ego trips being exposed there. Also, you take encouragement to look deeper into yourself because you see how many around you are becoming happier and more integrated human beings.

The ashram is a hard place for ego trips to sustain themselves, but it is a garden nourishing one’s rise to clarity and happiness. Being a member of a real master’s community of disciples doesn’t make you dependent or turn you into a spiritual slave. If at first he requires you to surrender to him and to the regimens of his ashram it is no less an unreasonable request then that made by a surgeon who asks you to remain on the operating table until his surgery is finished.

It takes great intelligence to surrender yourself to a guru. He can say or do something outrageous, even unjustified, but if something he says or does as a device causes you to leave his presence in the middle of the surgery, you are the loser. You have chosen trifles over transcendence. The master doesn’t care about being politically or religiously correct, he cares about you. He wants to upset all your judgment ducks set in a neat row by your society. He has the compassion to poke a stick into the spokes of your finely tuned morality. He’s there to show that both good judgments and bad are worthless if they are borrowed.

A true master wants to destroy the chains connecting you to all arranged marriages with hand-me-down knowledge. He wants to pull the plug on your past and short out your fossilized traditions. He’s out to turn off your ego’s TV so the empty screen will reflect the couch potato pundit that idiotic life has made you. A master holds up a mirror to your face, risking his life for you, because most people don’t want to see their true reflection. They can break the mirror, persecute and even kill its holder. A true disciple, however, may cringe at the image of himself or herself, yet be grateful that the master cared enough to show the reflection of an adopted persona — a mask — no matter how ugly it may be. If the mask isn’t exposed by someone, how can you take it off and see your original face?

In the first step towards becoming unbearably light with ordinary being, the master is your surgeon. Sometimes the operation to relieve you from conditioned habits and borrowed identities is as painful as peeling off your own skin. The “honeymoon” with the guru may be over, yet one who is willing to learn must trust this mysterious doctor. You must follow the instructions of the master-midwife and bear down on the waves of contractions as you give birth to your own lost understanding of who you really are.

After the cathartic work is finished, the master’s next job is to pose experiments that the disciples must test for themselves. In my own case, my master admonished me gently but firmly to always remember that if during self-observation I dislike what I see coming up out of my unconscious, then face it. If I want to avoid something in life — never avoid. When fear stands up to paralyze me — go into that fear.

“That’s the only way to finish it,” my master said, “otherwise it will haunt you like a shadow.”

Anger, greediness for this and that, fears, pride, phoniness, etc.—name your worst nightmares from the ID (your IDiot nightmare), then see them come at you like a demon. Don’t shrink back. Do exactly the opposite of what your society’s conditioning says you should or should not do. In my case I faced — and still face — my demon programs. The ego, when faced straight-on rather than avoided or repressed, simply vanishes. I watch these programs as my master instructed, without judgment for or against, mindful of my breath, relaxing. What is watched isn’t “my” thoughts and feelings, they are “the” thoughts and feelings, passing in and out. They are mental traffic on the mind’s freeway and I’m sitting by the side of the road. Sometimes the freeway is empty; sometimes there’s a traffic jam of thoughts and emotions. The trick is not to get caught in the traffic, but just to watch the “cars” go by. Let the cars of thought honk and weave and fender-bend after their own destinations. Putting it another way, my being — my “watcher” — is like the sky. There is a “seeing” of clouds floating by — puffy-white and smiling or dark and thunderous — across empty sky.

A real master doesn’t want you to believe his or her statements. Belief to a true master is a cuddly euphemism that masks a state of blind ignorance. A master teaches you to either know something as your own experience, or to accept all that is unknown; and above all, he lays before a disciple the hypothesis that you can celebrate everything — happiness, sadness, life, death, all of it. He teaches acceptance of yourself, of others, even acceptance of nonacceptance.

A master will tell you often that he is just an ordinary human being, like you. He’s no messiah or God-man or avatar come to take up your sins or your responsibilities.

He’ll say you don’t need saving. You need “waking.”

That’s the only small difference between you and the master. You are extraordinarily sleepwalking through life and he is ordinarily awake.

Once a sleepwalker, now an awakened one, the master will declare, “If I can wake up so can you.”

***

Floods in Pakistan set to potentially undermine its Government. Fires in Russia cause the suspension of wheat exports so the people of Russia can eat.

“There will be stronger earthquakes, typhoons, tornadoes and hurricanes, droughts and floods will make all that happened in the 2009 and its far more devastating predecessor, 2008, look tame in comparison… Cold or suddenly hot, torrential or bone dry, it is the intensity of extreme weather that spikes in 2010. You’ll read here first about the source of a climate tipping point coming in 2010. Climate scientists will report it in 2011, after the weather of 2010 has savaged us.”

Read what they will report right now in Predictions for 2010. This book of prophecy, signed off on 1 November of last year accurately foresaw Mother Nature on the warpath in 2010 against human abuse of her ecological balance. It foresaw the problems. It defines the solutions.

John Hogue

(Friday the 13 of August 2010)

Osho.

Friends, The flood of comments keeps coming in from recent blogs about calling hallowed saints psychos and describing a path of trust that »»]]>

Osho.

Friends,
The flood of comments keeps coming in from recent blogs about calling hallowed saints psychos and describing a path of trust that is perhaps higher and truer a path than those of borrowed faiths. So, let’s fill up a new blog page full of community commentary as we explore part two of the Path of Trust with something I wrote for a book published in 1999 (for more information, click on Messiah).

***

The word Guru is a new victim in the serial killing of beautiful words by pop-culture. Apply it in titles like “guru of golf,” or the “gurus of Washington wonk” and you have secularized this Hindu term for a religious teacher to fit any Svengali of politics, sports or the arts. The technically correct dictionary translation of the Sanskrit word “guru” is the “venerable one” or “the spiritual master,” but that definition is a dead statue to anyone who has known and loved the real living and breathing article. The seeker touched by the presence of the guru knows a far more poetic definition.

A guru is like a great cloud, heavy with rains. So burdened is the rain cloud that it cannot contain itself. The heavy cloud must give the rain to the earth. The guru cloud doesn’t put conditions on where it deposits its rains; the guru cloud will equally share its bountiful showers on the sterile rocks and the fertile, thirsty soil.

A guru is a giving phenomenon.

A guru drowns its parched recipient with a monsoon of love, a cloudburst of refreshing awareness.

A guru doesn’t do anything. Just as the cloud doesn’t decide when or upon whom it releases its showers, a guru releases the heavy, bountiful silence and peace of his presence on everyone. And as with the rain, most people will just “open their umbrellas” and ignore this intrusion, while a precious few find the “soaking” inspiring.

In this latter group are the people who seek out gurus. They gather around the guru’s tranquil eye in the center of a cyclone that is an ashram — the guru’s spiritual community, or college campus of seekers and disciples. Dozens or tens of thousands of disciples can surround the guru of an ashram, and it can appear to outsiders and followers alike that he is their leader. It can appear that he is doing something to influence them. But a guru is not a doer. You could say he is filled to the brim with being.

Is-ness is his business.

The rain cloud doesn’t make an effort to grow flowers. Let the flowers and the rocks respond as they like. They are the doers. The rock does the drying off and forgets the rain; the seeded earth does the blossoming.

A guru is a catalytic agent. He or she precipitates a process in disciples without being involved in or changed by the consequences. He may walk and sit and eat and do the things other people do. He may help precipitate a transformation in his disciples as a result of committing some action that might surprise and shock the disciple to attention. A guru can be like a thunderclap—a rain cloud thunders whether or not anyone is there to be jolted to attention. The doing — or lack of response—to the Guru’s thunder is up to the disciple.

Each seeker of a spiritual teacher must bear witness to this mystery in their own unique way. I can say from my own experience that you know you are in the presence of an authentic guru when just his presence, his silence, is enough to bring new context to your existence. Just the fragrance of the master’s “Is-ness” can resurrect a forgotten knowing. Just his aura of no-worry, no-body-ness can nourish new buds of a lost innocence sprouting in a life lived in the drought-cracked land of society’s conditioning.

The guru is full of an emptiness you once had: a cleanness of mind and spirit you had forgotten. The guru is a catalytic agent for remembrance of a time when your brain wasn’t a dustbin for other people’s ideas and emotional baggage.

The master’s call is like the first kiss of humidity against the cracked and desiccated land. It is the electricity in the dry season’s stifling heat preceding the guru thunderstorm. You are expectant like the land. You trust that wet kiss on your cracked and desert-like face more than all the so-called better judgment dumped into you by your society’s mentors and tormentors. Something magnetic awakens inside and it draws you to his presence. Your heart leads the way, dragging the ego along like a cluster of cans clattering behind a honeymoon carriage. You go to the guru dragging your rusty bits of better judgment, ideas of love, and mental training along for the ride.

You go to your master. You take a risk.

Maybe society is right, and your guru is indeed a madman like a Hitler, or Jim Jones, or an Ashahara. Still you gamble that this one will not exploit you for his or her own messianic ego trip. You put your trust in your guru as being God’s madman, or as Godliness itself wearing a persona or masquerading in a brief illusion of form as a fly lure for the Infinite Fisherman to catch your heart.

Once it becomes clear that you have, for better or worse, already thrown your “deity dice” on this person’s crap table, you become your master’s disciple — you become someone willing to learn. This is fifty percent of the journey down the path of trust. In the second half the guru helps you take two more steps on the path.

Messiahs: The Visions and Prophecies
for the Second Coming , p. 218-219.

We will explore those two steps in Part Three an Four.

***

Predictions for 2010 — Fulfilled and Pending

Back on 1 November 2009 I signed off the following prediction:

Surface to air temperature increase from 1960 to 2060.

2010: the Year of the Temperature Tsunami

“I foresee 2010 as the year things get hot and stay hot in the climate, almost as if this is a temperature tsunami rolling across the earth from northern to southern hemispheres of season change… It will be reported in 2011 that a fault line in climate sustainability was breached in 2010 and thrust the global average of temperatures across the planet suddenly upward.”

Assessment
Starting with January, every month of the year 2010 has broken global heat records. So high where the summer temperatures in the southern hemisphere that the harsh winter storms in Europe and North America could not moderate the average temperature rise, see Earthweek. The most recent edition of Time Magazine filed the following report: “The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed what many might have suspected from their own recent experiences: this past June was the warmest on record. The combined global land and ocean temperature was 1.22 degrees Fahrenheit (0.68 Celsius) above the 20th-century average. According to NOAA’s National Climate Data Center, 2010 is well on its way to becoming the warmest year worldwide since 1880. The earliest date for which global data is available.”

Read more about he cause of the temperature tsunami in Predictions for 2010 and how it can be moderated.

John Hogue

(28 July 2010)

JAMES Perhaps it is time to wipe the dust »»]]> Friends,
Somebody had to say it at last. James provided the flint to fire off my response:

JAMES
Perhaps it is time to wipe the dust from that old family bible & see what God has in mind for the future of mankind since we have made such a mess of this world; and we have. John the revelator says he was ‘in spirit’ when he was shown a vision of man’s future while exiled on Patmos. Revelation 21 shows a whole new world that God will create at some future moment. I find that as something to look forward to.

HOGUE
The feeling or deep desire for a new start runs in many religious traditions. It is a prophetic will to power a house clean.

Roman Emperor Domitian exiled St. John the little Aegean Island of Patmos in A.D. 95. Holed up in his cave, John composed the most famous prophetic housecleaning (house-rub-outing) of the Earth. A fundamental question must be asked. What was St. John’s state of sanity when he wrote the Book of Revelation?

The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans Under the Command of Titus, A.D. 70'', Oil on canvas, 1850

The last time someone tried to give John of Patmos a thorough psychological examination was in Apocalypse and the writings on Revelation by D. H. Lawrence. He penned this small book just before he died in Provence, France, of tuberculosis at the age of 44. I too share Lawrence’s view that much of John of Patmos’ macabre vision is coming from his suppressed frustrations at being exiled by Rome. I would add that his all-time end-time grump set to parchment arose from a scarred mind of someone with post-traumatic disorder. Who really knows? Maybe he was a survivor of the Roman sack and slaughter of Jerusalem in 69 C.E.

The message passed through a broken medium. The Hebrew Prophet Daniel’s end-time revelation in the Nevi’im is the language of a mystic. John’s second-rate and hyperbolic rehash of Daniel is written in the language of an angry mad man. Daniel’s book is psychic. John’s is Psychotic. Also, there are fundamental points in his narrative that clearly show he intended his prophecy for his own immediate future and not for our times. (See 666). So, if what I’m saying is true, then to summon up desire of God or anybody else to end this world is a mistake. It’s lust for ending life from one who gave up on the world.

It is an anti-life religious disorder overtaking its victims in two phases. I first described them in detail as Prophaganda (a desire to foresee the end of a world one does not understand or hates) followed by Armageddonomics (the economics of doom). Prophaganda is the hypnotic suggestion the mafia of priests and reverends use to condition believers to abuse and make the destruction of the world happen as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Read the full details of this disorder by clicking here: Messiah.

The usual habit is to put all that is wrong about the mess of the world on man not following God’s will. I think the future will see it differently. The blame is on God making a stupid world construct.

Why create duality?

Why create sin?

God is ultimately responsible for sin. He will have to punish us shirking our responsibilities but not punish Himself when he is the father of response-ability. He’s the creator. Thus, he has created all and everything, right? Before there was the word and God created heaven and earth, before all of that, was there any good or evil? Did God not also create these when he created the context of duality?

Back in 1980, before I left America to see India and meet Osho for the first time, I used to work at a head and occult supply shop in Ports of Call, San Pedro, California. The owner of the establishment, in my opinion, pandered to the cliché sensationalism of the occult by calling the establishment “The Prophet.” No picture of Kahil Gibran but a sign at the bottom of the stairway leading into the second floor shop with a stereotypical image of a black cat and a cauldron. If ever there was a rancid meat mirage to attract flies of evangelical attention, this sign did the trick. They came up our stairs daily to save us. The owner didn’t have to deal with them daily, but her employers did.

"For Madmen Only: Price of Admission, Your Mind" was my first read of Osho's one-on-one counseling of devotees. Pay with your mind sounds like brainwashing? I hope so. Since I read this book back in 1980 I've been trying to wash my brain each moment of all the identity, conditioning and crap society has put there with Osho's meditations. It's good to be clean.

For today’s blog, I recall two finely dressed male saviors who begged to remind me that Satan created sin in the world. I thought I’d try to test their theology with a question inspired by something I’d just read in For Madmen Only, my first book of Osho’s spiritually iconoclastic writings.

I said, “OK, I get it, Satan created sin but who created Satan?”

That question took them aback and one replied after thinking it over, saying, “God created Lucifer the angel who then decided to become ‘Satan.’ That was his free choice given by God to be evil rather than devote himself to God’s good.”

“Good,” I said. “Quite right. But who is responsible for creating Lucifer? Had Lucifer not been created, had God not given Lucifer the power to go astray… Golly, if God hadn’t even created the notion of ‘going astray’, would we have ‘Satan’ this evangel of ’sin’?”

The evangelical duo went silent. Neither could give me an answer.

I pressed my point, “The source of evil was Satan, who was Lucifer, who was created by God. Thus, God is ultimately responsible for evil, is he not?”

One of the two faith-fettered fellows to his credit saw the logic and had to say yes. They departed quickly from The Prophet with a desire to tell further biblical “tales” tucked between their legs.

Osho, formerly known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. If something deep inside is stirred by looking into this face. If it reflects back to you a truth already nestled deep inside the being, once forgotten. Now remembered. There are meditations of Osho I would be happy to freely share with you. These meditations have helped me rediscover that light behind eyes, in ego mind-bind, forgotten. If you have a feeling to explore these meditations, just ask by email and information and links will be freely given.

Thus if God is the creator of all, therefore even evil is his responsibility. He need not give people a choice to do good or evil. He could have just created a universe of bliss and peace.

Why did God create disharmony? The Bible in all its evolutions lead to the psychotic prophecies of St. John as its penultimate accomplishment. Even Steven King couldn’t “right” a more vengeful and censuring horror story about the ultimate criminal punishing his creations. Upon reflecting on St. John’s final psychotic book punctuating as last word the “good news” of the Bible, there’s only one revelation worth keeping. God couldn’t have channeled the bible. Men channeled it.

What they call “god” is just the message of their subconscious minds, trying to understand the miraculous mystery of divine existence. Men personified this mystery. They made God their ultimate imaginary friend, like children do. He’s bigger than life, just like a child’s immoderate worship of a hero. God judges his world, breaking his toys and creations just like a child having a temper tantrum.

It’s a new era. Time to stop being childish.

That is why Nietzsche was right to provoke the mindset of people by saying, “God is dead!”

Do you know the whole statement of Nietzsche? Here it is:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us — for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.” (The Gay Science)

Humanity now is free of imaginary friends. Now we can be godliness itself, sharing divine freedom and the compassionate response-ability that goes on with divine freedom from our imaginary friends. That is our golden future. We are destined to recreate a “new heaven” of inner enlightenment and a “new earth” restored to ecological harmony.

***

More Fulfilled

Predictions for 2010

–Plus further predictions for the US Mid-Term Elections–

I documented the prediction (below) on 1 November 2009. It comes from the Chapter Finding your Groove of Greatness. Barack Obama does have the potential as well as the karma to be another Abraham Lincoln. Many of you might not believe it. Like Lincoln, he is making generally a mess of his first few years in office. Lincoln chose the wrong generals. Obama chooses the wrong economic advisors. Still there is progress, albeit a year late. Obama has advanced his Health Care Reform as I predicted he would, despite great resistance in the Congress. The reform is a work in progress. Congress has passed Obama’s Bank and Wall Street Reform. Like Health Care, these economic reforms will take many years of struggle and regeneration to mature. When I wrote the following, Obama was still enjoying an extended honeymoon with the American People. Here is its future foretold followed by today’s assessment:

“The honeymoon of change arriving without the luggage is over by the end of 2009. This perpetual arrival era of Obama’s presidency also ends. The promise of change must ripen into real change starting in 2010 and though Obama has not a civil war to fight [like Lincoln], he has to drag the status quo over the water, and end this tug of war match with real reform destroying the systemically dysfunctional culture of our body politic and body economic. The defeats in battles of bear market runs in Wall Street are waiting, but like Lincoln, Obama must revive the battle hymn of anti-trust laws, and responsible regulation and redouble the attack once more. Mine eyes have seen the monopolies destroying all the jobs. He must fight his battles not pitting blue against gray but a moderately liberal blue opposed to a new and radical red posing as conservative philosophy.”

Assessment
Rumblings of a Euro crisis over Greece overshadow Europe. A Tory led coalition in Britain leads a movement across the Euro-zone promoting austerity measures to bring down national debts. This is in direct conflict with Obama’s philosophy of spend now to stimulate economic growth, then pay down the debt later. Obama’s forward economic progress to recovery has hit an oil slick disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that may later goo up the newest economic bubble. Unemployment check payments are running out for millions. The Gulf’s fishing and tourist industries take a slick slamming. Obama’s mistake (as I foresee it) of a six-month deep drill moratorium slams the last Gulf industry standing. Millions more across a five state region are losing their jobs. A bear market and a new recession loom after the autumn leaves have fallen in 2010.

Sarah Palin goes Grizzly Adams Bear market on the President. She plays Obama’s change game with her own “yes we Ameri-can-ism” charismatic attacks on his administration. Palin is full of hyperbole and fury yet makes that fatal GOP mistake in the mid-terms pontificating that real solutions to our economic problems with a litany of Bushism dogma, such as cutting taxes stimulates growth.

“Where have these people been in the eight years of Sarah Palin’s G.W. Bush-whacking?” say the liberals.

A great leap backwards will not win the Republicans the House and the Senate in November. Beyond the potential pitchforking of incumbents and the potential for tearing the Washington establishment all down at the ballot, the mid-term elections can be a battle of progressively conservative versus progressively liberal ideas.

An extreme right-wing red colors much of the core Tea Party movement, even though many who flock to its mostly incoherent cause are members of what I’ve called in previous books and blogs the “Invisible Majority” of American voters grown disenchanted and feeling politically disenfranchised by the Democrat-Republican duopoly running the Federal and State governments.

These independent voters are not generally extremists but they are politically homeless. As the majority of Americans are a bit right of center in their politics it is understandable that many try out the Tea Party scene, or that they might chose to vote in Tea Party candidates as a kind of protest vote.

If I have read my oracle right the aggregate swing of votes will do more to dilute the Republican Brand than throw the Democrat bums out of House of Reps. and Washington DC homes. Successful primary Tea Party candidates like Rand Paul running for the US Senate seat in Kentucky bumped a mainstream Republican hopeful for the chance. However, like many a Tea Party candidate, his extreme views might alienate the moderate mainstream voters in November.

The Democrats may read the signs better than the Republicans this fall, and gain back momentum. Obama “has” revived a battle hymn of banking and Wall Street reform in 2010 that was missing in 2009. Talk of dismantling banking monopolies to shrink “banks too big to fail” into smaller banks is finding Obama’s political push now. He has also had to listen and learn from blue dog democrats what they demand in legislation to pass Health Care in March without a radicalizing Republican Caucus in Congress. Read more…

John Hogue

(20 July 2010)

Osho.

Friends, Sarah here, like many of you, has an authentic desire to better the world to which she was born. Many millions of »»]]>

Osho.

Friends,
Sarah here, like many of you, has an authentic desire to better the world to which she was born. Many millions of souls have come, made efforts, and vanished from our memory, doing good deeds for the world and each other. Why then, with so many good people trying so hard has the earth reached this potential ecological apocalypse? If we are to break this syndrome and foresee a better future for all of us, we must look to why good people make bad futures.

SARAH
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.

HOGUE
Perhaps one of the most fundamental habits undermining each of us is a noble idea that we must save the planet. Meditating upon Sarah’s letter has directed me to read a passage from my teacher of meditation, Osho. His answer to a disciple uncovers our “save the world instinct.” It is an instinct mimicking virtue.

“The question is meaningful,” Osho said, “But very complex to understand. You are asking ‘Though your emphasis has been for us, as individuals to go within to save ourselves, I guess I am still naïve enough to feel that our love, our dancing, our joy, could still save this beautiful planet.’

“It may save the beautiful planet, but you should not carry the idea within you; otherwise it will destroy your love and your dance and your joy. If deep down you are guessing that ‘my love, my dancing, my joy can save the whole planet,’ it is the strategy of the ego. You are becoming a savior. You are becoming so great that you can save the whole planet, just by your love and just by your dancing, just by your joy.

“Try to understand the complexity. It is possible, if individuals are full of love, full of joy, and their life is not a drag, but a dance…as a by-product it is possible the planet may be saved. But as a by-product — you cannot take the credit for saving the world.

“This is the trouble: if you start thinking that you are dancing to save the world, your dance is destroyed. Then you are not dancing totally, then you are not dancing here and now; then your dancing has become a means to save the world. Then your love is not pure love — it is just another means, but the end is to save the world…”

See Osho, The Hidden Splendor, (1987)
Session 16: Love is Always an Emperor.

What I read Osho saying is radical. It is upside down from how we have been taught to be right-side up. And frankly, if we were seeing the problem right-side up, a solution to sustain, let alone save, the world would have blossomed and succeeded long ago. The egoistic abuser of the earth and the egoistic do-gooder for the earth are habits and personas we have had affixed to our souls by our society.

Osho used to mispronounce the word “society” as “suici-ety”. Perhaps he did this on purpose, because if we unconsciously continue to follow our society’s suicidal programming then humanity does not have a future.

That revelation no longer frightens me. Energy is neutral. The mind gives it a false color. The soul, however, free of the mind and personality can turn terror into a celebration of the urgent need to change, to light my candle in the darkness.

Insights like those Osho shared above inspired the following reflection published back in 1994, see Predictions for the future:

***

What haven’t humans of good conscience done to try to save this world?

And yet…

All efforts to bring peace on Earth have failed; at best we have weathered and adapted to wars and disasters and dulled our pain with holy consolations. We have established laws to govern our actions because we are incapable of living according to our own consciousness. The imposed conscience of societal morality prevents us from ever living beyond the mechanical knee-jerk worship of duty and following orders. At best, our civilization has functioned but not flowered.

All the ingenious efforts to save the world have done nothing but bring us to this dangerous crossroads. One can despair at ten thousand years of failure, or see each disappointment as a step closer to success. Where we are now tells me that humankind must be very close to the answer.

We stand before a tomorrow of fear or a tomorrow of revelation. The seers of the future are trying to give us instructions on how to build a bridge to endless tomorrows rather than stumble along with our cherished traditions and beliefs to an all-too-predictable disaster.

Perhaps we are unable to save our planet because nearly all of us are missing the obvious and necessary first step to save it. And that first step can’t even be considered because our past-oriented programming is preventing us from even knowing there’s a first step to take.

The key must be right in front of our noses, maybe even closer. That is why we’ve always missed it, life after life, eon after eon. Society has trained everyone not to see the key. I have seen this heartbreaking truth in every culture I’ve encountered, no matter how different its façade of morality and tradition.

***

I sense some of you asking, “What does this have to do with the Media’s Mask of Nostradamus?”

Everything. Because the reflections you have just read are the kind of things the television editors and their corporate handlers leave on the cutting room floor in over 100 documentaries in which I have appeared since 1987. They do this because they do not think you are interested or even intelligent enough to hear and see me saying such things. Moreover, such observations are dangerous to the status quo because these dictators of media dissemination rate your stupidity as higher than the ratings they might risk losing if they edited documentaries to match your intelligence.

Perhaps they are right. Perhaps as long as we remain part of the masses rather than live as conscious individuals the television industry is serving up exactly what we want to see on the tube.

I for one would like to risk testing your ratings as intelligent beings because I am in the unique position not held by any prophecy scholar in 20 years. I have been on just about every major documentary on prophecy and Nostradamus since 1987. I know intimately what has been left out of these documentaries.

In Part four, I will continue responding to Sarah’s letter and look farther behind the gloaming glass filter of your television’s flickering eye.

John Hogue

(13 April 2010)