apocalypse wow

[daniel]

maybe we know this already, but it is always good to think about it again. Monbiot is one of the best journalist/ leftist commentators in the UK.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1195568,00.html

Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power

US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 20, 2004
The Guardian

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first
understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening
there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's
Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at
the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.

The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters:
homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any
mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the
ownership of guns" should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax,
capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and
immigrants should be deterred by electric fences. Thus fortified, they
turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7,000 miles
away. It was then, according to a participant, that the "screaming and
near fist fights" began.

I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was
"watered down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The
motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to
Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to
absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it
wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism. Good to see that the
extremists didn't prevail then.

But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of
a state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign
affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we
still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an
extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers
cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to
create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to
Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was
the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's
occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle
East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied
by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the
antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will
lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will
either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to
Earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that
before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who
believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and
wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do
the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able
to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents
being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven
years of Tribulation which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means
staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US
Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there),
sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding
ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle
with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European
Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their
efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise
of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio
Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a
very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby
exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast.

By clicking on www.rapture (http://www.rapture) ready.com, you can discover how close you
might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should
take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one
point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be
filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and
Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debat ing
its constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the south Atlantic,
Hamas has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second
coming is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug
abuse among teenagers and a weak showing by the antichrist (both of
which score only two).

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That
their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American
pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or
movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999
suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans. The
best-selling contemporary books in the US are the 12 volumes of the
Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a
"fictionalised" account of the Rapture (this, apparently,
distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details
about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all
this don't believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life
eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John
Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several
prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay
(who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle
Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel
last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no
moderate position worth taking".

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of
the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on
Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its
members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation
(9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great
river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men".
They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support
for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out
of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian
fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this.
Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US
electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of
secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the
electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a
personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there,
his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in
other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli
aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad
to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

[dragonfly]

Daniel, I'm curious about your thinking on the relationship between this biblical apocalypse scenario and the various theories regarding 2012. Will your book address this?

[Halfglass]

*sigh* The big showdown is gonna be all about trying to kill religion. Carl Sagan had a theory that interstellar beings may not exist as space travelers due to the fact that (given it can take 4.5 billion years to get from a single-cell to a self-aware being--and that if giant falling balls of rock from space land at critical times during the clawing, upward journey of the life-forms) various belief systems always arise, and so there is the keeping-in with nature's slate-cleaning, no-free-lunches ways.

[leaperinthelight]

http://www.neopagan.net/ReligiousReich.html

See the above link for a indepth report on the severity of this cultural problem.

[Buzz]

Still, in all, it's a bit worrisome isn't it. Religious fanatics, strange government ties to them. I remember back in the Raygun days how the Fundamentalist at the CIA/FBI didn't foresee the Berlin wall coming down because Armageddon had not taken place in Israel yet. True story folks.
I don't think that these "freedom loving" Christians understand that if they were given "the" ring of power that they would rule like the Taliban. Civil Rights be damned! How the hell did this ever happen in the US?

Some of you may recall a story a couple of years back how a group of Christian religious fanatics disappeared. Family members were very worried about them as they had no notice as to there whereabouts. Well, they finally surfaced in Israel. Apparently they were there to carry out their plan to blow up the Dome of the Rock and usher in Armageddon, making way for the return of Christ. Jesus is back, and he's pissed off.

"W's" entire presidency is way too reminescent of the fundamentalist vice-president in Tom Robbins novel, Skinny Legs and All . In that fictional work, however, that guy (who was no doubt modeled on then vice, Dan Quayle) lost in the election. Comforting him was someone who re-assured him that, "their day would come", or something to that effect. Well, their day is here and now. Robbins ended up being downright prophetic on that one. The biggest f**k-up president in our history sits in office. I even miss the blowjob president, moderate that he was. Kerry is bending to the right now, trying to win votes. I think it's all a scam promoted by the mass media, are people in this country really that conservative, or are they the only ones who vote?

[Halfglass]

I think I'm turning socialist. If it could be done right that'd be the answer.

[gone]

Originally posted by Halfglass:
I think I'm turning socialist. If it could be done right that'd be the answer.You weren't already?

[Halfglass]

Well let me think. I do belive I've always been one it's just that until recently I've been a-political I think. (Besides it can take growing up and older to shed all that conditioning/brainwashing "they've" been feeding "us" since the cold war started concerning the "s" word!)

[daniel]

dragonfly asked about "the relationship between this biblical apocalypse scenario and the various theories regarding 2012. Will your book address this?"

Yes I have been thinking about it a lot. I think we are in the Apocalypse, as predicted and advertised. Revelation 11 describes the fall of the Twin Towers in graphic form. I think that Jose Arguelles is correct in what he writes in Time and the Technosphere about the 1,260 years in Revelation being a code for the "12:60" desynchronized timing frequency of modern materialist civilization, coming to an end in 2012.

The Apocalypse is in Jungian terms an archetype, and archetypes are psychic events that await the proper moment to "constellate" in reality, which they can do only once. I think that the archetypes constellate as soon as the conditions have been achieved. The preconditions are now in place for The Apocalypse.

In this one area, I find that I agree with Reagan etc, more than with Chomsky etc. The Left and the academic / liberal intelligentia do not recognize the reality of the Psyche -- a horrible mistake -- so they are completely baffled and unready to understand an archetypal process taking place in reality.

The Jungian disciple Eddinger writes in his great book Archetypes of the Apocalypse that the apocalypse is a psychic event, representing "the momentous moment of the coming-to-realization of the Self." This process takes place through a paradoxical union of opposites.

[daniel]

Actually I think he calls it "the coming-to-self-realization of human consciousness," which is the descent of the Self, the God-image, into humanity. Don't have the book in front of me.

[Halfglass]

The God Head comin' down to see itself! Look at me! ME! You? (Weird stuff man.) Revelation 11? Really? (I'm glad people are watching this stuff man! Can't wait for the book now!) I think we're in for some show. If Bentov is right and this thing keeps going around (time, or the illusion of it) (my theory now) not necessarily karma is involved but the It changes places in the action endlessly! The King here, the bum there.

[ April 23, 2004, 11:46 AM: Message edited by: Halfglass ]

[gone]

Human history is then Purgatory, the absence of the God-image.

The thought of an immanent Eschaton gives me a tingling shudder every time, let alone that eschatology is time-bound, itself to be transcended.

I will lift my eyes up to the mountain, from whence comes my help.

[daniel]

Halfglass: "If Bentov is right and this thing keeps going around (time, or the illusion of it) (my theory now) not necessarily karma is involved but the It changes places in the action endlessly! "

I recently felt that I understood on a deeper level the whole Mayan thing, which I am meditating on all the time. I agree with Arguelles that they provided a map of time, left the information to harmonically attune us to the galactic timing frequency and move from dissonant mortal chaos to what may be a post-2012 harmonic immortal order. He suggests that this may be at least the 4th world or solar system where they have performed this task, like "galactic ants." But the question then is why go through this again and again to return one more time?

12/21/12 is the moment when the Sun and the Earth come into alignment with the Galactic Center - an event that happens once every 26,000 years. We are also 26,000 light years away from the Galactic Center. And the entire cycle of the Precession of the Equinoxes takes 26,000 years.

I think that the effort started at or near the Galactic Center, Hunab Ku, and that as the evolution of consciousness moves out from the center (which the Maya recognized as the "hole in the sky," and has in fact turned out to be an enormous black hole, according to astronomers in the last few years), each world that is visited, into which evolving (and already highly evolved Mayan, Pleidian, etc.) souls incarnate, is ultimately harmonized in accord with the galactic center: A direct link-up is established. As the Maya move out from the center, the project becomes more dense and chaotic -- the "magic trick" becomes difficult -- each time. The God-Image is forced to incarnate deeper and deeper into matter, to become more humble and more compassionate, with each turn of the spiral.

Those souls who don't make the transition in this cycle go through the entire process again on the next world, in the next system that supports our type of conscious life (though under different - worse - boundary conditions), further out towards the edge of the galaxy, requiring an even more difficult effort to harmonize and attune. In this way, as Rilke wrote:
"Although we may not like it,
God grows."

God grows by growing in us and through us.

[daniel]

Here is the relevant part of Rev 11. You would have to allow for the idea that "prophecying" might refer to economic forecasting. Also, it is interestign that I saw many children's murals representing the towers as candlesticks after 9-11.

Do other people find the parallels as clear as I do?

Rev11
3: And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.
4: These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth.
5: And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed.
6: These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.
7: And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.
8: And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.
9: And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves.
10: And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.

13: And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.
14: The second woe is past; and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.

[gone]

I imagine one could see many situations of conflict in these lines.

Two-ness is inherent in almost everything and the tower image abounds.

This, despite the fact that like Mulder, I Want to Believe.

[Phlash]

Originally posted by daniel:
"Do other people find the parallels as clear as I do?"

Or what about this verse; it may not be biblical but it was perhaps written by a prophet (and it really gives me the creeps when I think of it in light of 9/11):

All along the watchtower princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants too

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl

[Halfglass]

Rob: ("cold" distance--and 9/11 was in Sept.!) Kidding, but this does illustrate the old problem of the vagueness of old words.

[Phlash]

Agreed about old words and "prophecy" Halfglass, but FWIW, Bobdylan.com has it as just "distance", no "cold"!

[leaperinthelight]

Originally posted by daniel:
Here is the relevant part of Rev 11. You would have to allow for the idea that "prophecying" might refer to economic forecasting. Also, it is interestign that I saw many children's murals representing the towers as candlesticks after 9-11.

Do other people find the parallels as clear as I do?

Rev11
3: And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.
4: These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth.
5: And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed.
6: These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.
7: And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.
8: And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.
9: And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves.
10: And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.

13: And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.
14: The second woe is past; and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.Dear Daniel and Group :

Frankly I am at the point that I get rather upset when I read or hear about any form of Prophecy . First off it seems to me that most Biblical Prophecy is simply a prediction of downfall or invasion .This prediction is made by a person or group based on what is what is going on in a society at a given time.
This goes all the way back to the Golden Calf incident .
Isaiah , Jeremiah and the other Old Testament Prophets all were concerned with decay and immorality in their societies and predicted downfall if vigilance , return to morality ,and attention to God were not restored . It is social comment set in dramatic and religious drama .
This kind of thinking is still seen today as in when Pat Robertson and Jerry Farwell recently blamed the 9-11 attacks on America’s tolerance of Homosexuality .
The New Testament Chapter of Revelations was prediction of what was or could happen to the young church founded by Paul of Tarsus . Furthermore the vision , language and drama is probably beyond the understanding of the Modern much less Postmodern mindset.

Frankly it seems many in this forum also conflate disparate mythologies at will. I mean in this section of the forum alone we have Ancient Hebrew thinking , very early Christian thinking , blended with Jose Arguelles’s thinking or interptation on the Mayan world view and calendar . Lets just throw in Swedenborg and Nostradamus for good measure . It’s time to go back and read our Joseph Campbell when he talks about mythogenesis . I feel that many Entheogen using cultures can and have contributed to our understand of reality , but each vision is merely an abstraction of the totality of the Cosmos .

[daniel]

Tim,

Thanks for the comment.

I think we have the full right to think about and correlate all of these esoteric systems with each other. The fact is, the correlations reveal interesting similarities. Arguelles in Time and the Technosphere also correlates the Mayan 2012 prophecy, with the Islamic tradition, and the Apocalypse, even a bit of the Hopis thrown in there. These mythic structures are archetypes, and archetypes as Jungians say, will constellate in the human reality when their moment arrives. Christ's incarnation was an archetype that existed in the Old Testament and elsewhere and constellated when he arrived. The realm of the physical and the psychic cannot be separated - as Jung described in his essay on synchronicities. Hence, we have to take the maps of the collective psyche which are our myths and archetypes very seriously. We have to reach an understanding that goes beyond modern "rational" dualism, which sees the Apoc as being related to one specific historical circumstance from the time it was written, because clearly the text is a channelled prophetic work intended to have universal meaning. The rationalists and the Left as well are failing to understand what is happening now, because they reject the psyche entirely. In some ways, the atavistic Fundamentalists are closer to the truth (a truth, ironically, they are helping to create and accelerate), although their udnerstanding is crude and barbaric. I really recommend reading Archetypes of the Apocalpyse by Eddinger, as well as The Ever Present Origin by Jean Gebser, and Time and the Technosphere by Arguelles, if you want better cognitive maps to comprehend what is happening, at least what is hapening from my perspective.

Ultimately as the Buddha said: "What you think is what you are."

Tell me what you think and I will tell you what you are.

[gone]

Leaper says, ‘Frankly I am at the point that I get rather upset when I read or hear about any form of Prophecy.’

I think it’s important as well to remember that because it is not one thing it doesn’t mean it must therefore be the opposite. I find some prophecy rather fanciful but this does not mean that I assume a mode of total ‘rationality.’ While Wilber is often a dreadful bore, I find his model of pre-rational, rational and transrational useful in this context. This model provides a framework for us rationally conditioned folk to absorb what is often considered ‘irrational’ without being labelled total La-las.

More than this while we get to choose where we want to sit along the spectrum of truth rather than at one end or the other, it is also prudent to acknowledge that there are aspects of truth to all positions on the spectrum at the same time.

That said, I find this Revelation thing a bit if a stretch, BUT, as Bob said, ‘we got to fulfil the book.’

[daniel]

I thought stretching is supposed to be good for you.

When I was watching the 2002 election returns on TV, it also occurred to me that the "locusts with human faces" were the news anchors on CNN and FOX, the mass media acting like a plague of locusts devouring reality and leaving a desert of the real.

[dragonfly]

Daniel, have you considered Dr. Rips' Bible Code and what it says about 9/11? This is an excerpt from The Bible Code author Michael Drosnin's Web site at http://www.bible-prophecy-prediction-books.com/

It seems to indicate that prophecies are being expressed on two levels in the Bible -- on the literary level in Revelations et al., and on a deeper symbolic level in the text of the Torah itself.

TWIN TOWERS ATTACK FORETOLD IN BIBLE CODE

The same words that appeared in newspaper headlines all over the world the day after September 11, 2001, were encoded in the Bible 3000 years ago - against amazing odds of 500,000,000 to 1.

"Twin" "Towers" "Airplane" "Attack" and "Twice" are encoded together in the ancient text, a detailed report 3000 years old as accurate as the report in the New York Times.

"This is the best proof of the Bible code," said Eliyahu Rips, the famous Israeli mathematician who discovered the code. "This could not happen by chance."

Professor Rips found the Bible code table on the very day two jumbo jets crashed into the World Trade Center - known in Hebrew as the "Twin Towers" - exactly the same words that appeared in the banner headline of the New York Times the next day.

The same report in the Times and the Bible.

"This is a perfect experiment, a test of the Bible code no one can question," said Rips.

"It uses extremely simple straightforward data, words that describe in detail an event within the common knowledge of everybody."

When Dr. Rips calculated the odds against it happening by chance - using powerful new computer software created by a colleague, Professor Robert Haralick of City University in New York - the statistics were amazing: half a billion to one. There could be no question. The events of September 11 were intentionally encoded in the Bible.

Haralick, a past president of the International Association of Pattern Recognition, a field of mathematics most closely related to codes, recently developed the new software that allows odds in the Bible code to be measured more precisely than was ever possible before.

"It is the best proof of the Bible code," said Rips again. "The words are all a priori - "Twin" Towers" "Airplane" - there are no other words to describe the tragedy."

In fact, Dr. Rips and I found the same code table at the same time on the same day, within minutes of the fall of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

It had a special impact on me. I had just witnessed the horror with my own eyes, from the roof of my home in New York, less than a mile away. I saw the second plane hit, I saw the two towers fall, and then I saw it on my computer -in ancient Hebrew letters in a text 3000 years old.

-- Michael Drosnin


[ April 26, 2004, 03:27 AM: Message edited by: dragonfly ]

[gone]

Originally posted by daniel:
I thought stretching is supposed to be good for you.True. Let's do a DVD.

[jezebelle]

Just a note, in numerology - 11 - is a master number, as 22. Eleven is the prophet, communicator of the divine, whereas 22 builds and makes the divine. how ap-pro-po (sp? sorry I have not idea how to look up)

I like how it all fits, which proves that we are one somehow, even at this crazy level. Somehow I am comforted by that thought. Every day is a chance to get it right.

dragonfly: what a unique opportunity that you were so close and alive; I forget nothing of that day. I still feel it too. It changed my career-path and surprisingly for the better. I actually got freed and I would have not gotten the courage to do it on my own.

Am I crazy, but I think we will keep something very good when it is all said and done.

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by jezebelle:
Jdragonfly: what a unique opportunity that you were so close and alive...I apologize for the misunderstanding -- that was Drosnin writing about being close to the WTC on 9/11.

[whitewave]

Jezebelle--I thing we will keep something good too when it is all done...
I think about the state of despair I was in when I entered this forum a year and a half ago. Internalizing the energy of apocalypse to the point where I was convinced that I was literally going to die....
As I held on and opened my heart many synchronicities came my way which have enabled me to see beyond "the end" ---to embrace the end as a new beginning and to let go of my ego attachment and fear of an end as my conscious mind lets go of limitations. Many of the synchronicities have come to me from this forum--I think of Daniel's ideas about the purpose of the Kali yuga as being created by female energy in anger at the inability to fully realize shakti energy---I see this everywhere now, and it has helped me let go of my very deep anger toward men on a personal and worldwide level. I just read through the thread on the ego today,, which brought to mind my most recent shattering revelation--that all the hurts I have experienced have been lessons taught to me by my soul--in order that it may heal and vibrate more clearly. Although I still struggle, this realization has enabled me to forgive everything, and even more than that, to be grateful for all that I have experienced in a way that transcends the desires of my personality. Is this what we are supposed to realize by 2012? Is this what it means to align the soul with the personality? When do we know when we have arrived at this point? Sometimes I feel like I have, but it is hard to hold onto. The only thing I am sure of is that the more I allow my heart to open, the calmer I become, and the more willing to accept this life on earth, which is a beautiful place, despite what all of us have done to it. Evidence is everywhere--grass pushing its way through the cracks, tree roots warping the sidewalks, sparrows chirping to each other on the power lines. We are all lessons for each other, and I think we are all beginning to know this. Thank you to all here who have contributed to my soul's growth and soothed my growing pains.

[daniel]

thanks for the nice posts, whitewave, etc.

As for the Bible Code, I just can't get into it. I know it might seem odd or accidental that I would prefer my own interpretation and Arguelles interpretations to Drosnin's, but somehow I just have this intuitiion that the bible code is ultimately a useless piece of junk, and I can't override it enough to actually take it seriously. This also makes me understand why someone like leaperinthelight would be so quick to reject Arguelles' pronouncements. But having gone down the Arguelles rabbithole myself, I think his ideas are strong and helpful.

Perhaps part of it is that the bible code is so passive? Just put the info into a computer and this comes out... it all seems like a false lead to me. However in Time and the Technosphere, when Arguelles talks about the "19 code" in the Quran and the "19 angels guarding the gates of hell" perhaps referencing the 19 hijackers, i feel there is something legitimate to it.

I keep coming back to the idea that the basic virtue of the "Earth Plane" in the Qabalah is "discrimination." Each person has to learn to discriminate for themselves. My understanding can only help others to a certain extent.

I also agree with Steiner that instead of there being an absolute "Truth", the task of thinking is the work of reconciling percepts and concepts, which is a limitless project. Any "read" of prophecy is one attempt at reconciliation.

Someone different than me might put together a tremendously excellent interpretive structure using The Bible Code, Nostradomus, David Icke, etc, but I would never be able to vibe on it or care. It may be a question of aesthetics.

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by daniel:
...somehow I just have this intuitiion that the bible code is ultimately a useless piece of junk, and I can't override it enough to actually take it seriously. I can understand how a literary person such as yourself would find the Bible Code less-than-appealing aesthetically, but I think calling it a "useless piece of junk" might be unduly harsh. After all, the code not only foretold 9/11 but also the Columbia disaster, the Rabin assassination, the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Oklahoma City bombing, and many other historic events.

At the same time, though, part of me hopes you're right that the code is just junk, because it foretells of terrible things to come, including an attack of some sort on New York as early as this year and nuclear war in the Middle East in 2006. Yikes.

[kris ifans]

There was a programme on British television a few years ago, I can't remember fully, but I recall the mathematics used for the "bible code" prophecies was said to be flawed and the original mathematician involved with the author had ceased to comment on the subject. Though his apparent silence can be interpreted in many ways of course.

Not sure if this has any relevance to the discussion...

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by kris ifans:
There was a programme on British television a few years ago, I can't remember fully, but I recall the mathematics used for the "bible code" prophecies was said to be flawed and the original mathematician involved with the author had ceased to comment on the subject.Are you referring perhaps to the BBC documentary? Here's Drosnin's critique of that program:

DAILY MAIL (London)
November 22, 2003
HEADLINE: BIBLE CODE CONSPIRACY
BYLINE: MICHAEL DROSNIN
BODY:
ON THURSDAY night, the BBC's flagship science series Horizon broadcast a 250,000 documentary about the Bible Code, based on my two books - both first serialised in the Daily Mail - that reveal the discovery of a code in the Bible that tells the future and warns that we face unprecedented danger.

But what was most interesting about this film was the parts it left out: all the best proof that the code is real, all the best answers to those who question it, all the world leaders who believe its dire warnings, and - most startlingly - an extraordinary revelation that a message in the 3,000-year-old text foretold every major detail of the death of Princess Diana.

Under the guise of an impartial documentary, the BBC seems to have set out to rubbish the Bible Code by suppressing crucial evidence - ignoring documents and film that established the code's reality beyond doubt.

First, the Diana code. It was found by the great Israeli scientist who discovered the Bible Code, Professor Eliyahu Rips. But the BBC did not show it. It did not show Rips presenting a code in the Bible with 'Diana' and 'Paris' and 'they killed me' encoded together in one chapter of Genesis.

'Diana' is hidden in the text of Chapter 12, Verse 11, where Abraham says to his wife Sarah: 'Behold now, I know that you are a beautiful woman.' In the same place in the ancient text there also appears with 'a beautiful woman' the words 'the Egyptian' and 'engagement'.

The odds against those words all appearing together by chance in the Bible are 10 million to 1. It had to be intentionally encoded - 3,000 years before Diana died.

So why didn't the BBC film Rips revealing this extraordinary message? I can only assume it wanted to hide the truth.

As many Mail readers will know, the Bible Code is based on the original Hebrew Bible - the first five books of the Old Testament, which Jews call the Torah. Rips found the code by laying out the entire text in one continuous strand of 304,805 letters. He searched the letters for hidden words and phrases revealed by skipping any equal number of letters.

Take this sentence: 'Rips explained that each code is a case of adding every fifth or tenth or 50th letter to form a word.' It makes perfect sense on the surface, but highlighting every fourth letter reveals a hidden message underneath: 'READ THE CODE.' Using a computer, Rips could use every possible skip sequence to find chosen words. But he stuck to codes with the shortest possible 'skips' - the minimum gaps between highlighted letters - because they were the least likely to happen by chance and had most mathematical meaning.

Rips displayed the letters in rows of equal length, stacked on top of each other, and found that coded messages crossed vertically, horizontally, and diagonally - like a crossword puzzle hidden in the Bible.

Modern events were revealed - from the day the Gulf War would start (which Rips discovered weeks in advance) to full details of the 9/11 atrocities.

CHILLINGLY, the codes also warned that we may be facing nuclear Armageddon - probably in the year 2006. Although the code foretelling Diana's death has never been published before, it was found six years ago by Rips and his colleagues, within days of her fatal car crash.

But it was only while cooperating with the BBC filmmakers that Rips, using powerful new computer tools, discovered the extraordinary odds against it appearing by coincidence.

He was doing this to demonstrate to the BBC that a fake 'code' in the novel Moby Dick - presented on the programme by an Australian critic who claims such codes can be found in any large book - has no mathematical meaning at all.

The BBC showed the Australian academic Dr Brendan McKay presenting his Moby Dick code revealing 'Lady Diana', 'death' and 'Dodi' ( referring to Diana's companion Dodi Fayed), supposedly hidden in the 19th-century adventure written by Herman Melville.

What the BBC did not tell its viewers was that the odds of these words appearing together in the novel were no worse than 10 to 1 - well within random chance.

That is because McKay was happy to use any skip sequence to get a chance result. McKay admits that his codes have no mathematical meaning, and that he was just playing games to mock the Bible Code by creating fake codes in a novel.

This has never been a secret. Since he discovered the Bible Code, Prof Rips has accepted you can find all sorts of messages in the Bible - or any book - provided you're prepared to throw out all the rules.

It gets significant only if, like Rips, you keep the skip sequences as short as possible and look for words and phrases that are tightly interlinked.

Eli Rips is recognised by mathematicians around the world as a genius - one of the leading authorities in group theory, a field of maths that underlies quantum mechanics. He works with the utmost rigour, and is interested only in results that are mathematically significant.

In order to get 'Dodi' close enough to 'Diana' to make the two words seem to cross each other in Moby Dick, McKay had to keep using ever greater skip sequences.

In fact, he had to ignore 58 shorter skips that would also produce the word 'Dodi', but with no connection to Diana. The same principle applies to all the key parts of his pattern of interlocking words.

For example, McKay also claimed to have turned up the name of Diana's driver, 'Henri Paul', but only by ignoring thousands of shorter skips that also threw up that sequence of letters, utterly divorced from any reference to Diana.

McKay was playing tennis without a net, on a court with no boundaries. It was not related to the meticulous research performed by Rips. In the Bible, the name 'Diana' appears with no skips at all (the letters are simply reversed). 'They killed me' and 'a beautiful woman' also appear with no skips. In the same pattern of words, the city of her death - 'Paris' - appears with the smallest skip for that letter sequence in Genesis, and the second shortest in the Bible as a whole.

Similarly, ' engagement' appears with the shortest skip needed to find it in the Bible. Unlike McKay, Rips didn't have to strain to find these hidden words. They appeared using the shortest, simplest codes he tried.

'It is an empirical principle,' says Rips. 'The key to the Bible Code is the minimal or near minimal skips, because they are statistically less likely.' TEN TO one in Moby Dick. Ten million to one in the Bible. The statistics tell their own story - but BBC viewers never found that out.

I was there, at Rips's home in Jerusalem, when he showed the BBC on camera what he called 'the best proof of the Bible Code' - every detail of the 9/11 attack on New York encoded 3,000 years ago against odds he then calculated at 70 million to 1.

On the very day the attack happened, 'Twin Towers' and 'Airplane' and 'Attack' and 'Twice' were found encoded together in the ancient text - exactly the same words that appeared in headlines around the world the next day. Rips's latest computer software proved the astonishing odds. 'When the BBC filmed the interview,' he told me a few days ago, 'the computer run had just started, and it gave odds of 70 million to 1.

'Now I have completed the computation, and the real odds are 500 million to 1.' That, surely, is breathtaking. But it was not in the BBC documentary.

That interview was left on the cutting-room floor.

Also left out was Rips's devastating analysis of a 'code' in Moby Dick pretending to foretell the same event - but only by using the 40,000th appearance in the novel of 'Twin', the 70,000th appearance of the letters spelling out 'Atta' (the pilot who led the attack), the 1,700th 'Trade' and the 329th 'Center'.

Only by hunting through with ever bigger skip sequences could the Moby Dick code make these 'hidden' words interlock. In the Bible, every word came up using the first or second shortest skip code. And they appeared in just one chapter of the Book of Numbers, in an area so compact it was less than 1/300th of the text.

In Moby Dick there was, Rips said, 'not one good encoding'. So while the odds against the Bible message being chance were 500 million to 1, he told the BBC that the Moby Dick code was 'obviously of no mathematical meaning whatsoever'.

The BBC did not show that. It cut out Rips's entire reply to the Australian's bogus codes.

When my first Bible Code book was published in 1997, I issued a challenge: 'When my critics find in advance a message about the assassination of a Prime Minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them.' First the BBC had a narrator deliberately misquote me - leaving out the words 'in advance' - then under pressure put the words back in.

Then they pretended McKay had answered the challenge, by finding references to murders of world leaders that happened not 'in advance' but long ago.

The BBC showed McKay finding 'Kennedy' and 'he shall be killed' in Moby Dick - decades after JFK's assassination - and compared it to my finding of the murder of the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, a year before his death in 1995. Of course, the BBC did not reveal the odds of the Kennedy 'code' in Moby Dick - less than 20 to 1, well within random chance.

Nor did it show what I saw it film in Israel - Rips's mathematical analysis of the unique encoding of 'Yitzhak Rabin' in the Bible crossed by 'assassin will assassinate'. This was the one time Rabin's name ever appeared in the Bible, crossed by his murder against odds of 6,000 to 1.

The BBC also left out a filmed interview with the chief scientist at the Israeli Ministry of Defence, who confirmed I showed him that prediction more than a year before the assassination and that other predictions in the Bible Code, found in advance, also later came true.

The BBC did not tell its audience that I met three times with the chief of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that he takes the Bible Code so seriously he is now arranging for me to meet Prime Minister Sharon.

Nor did it reveal that President Clinton had my Bible Code book at the Camp David peace talks on the Middle East. Or that America's Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, asked me to brief the Pentagon on the eve of the war in Iraq - as the Mail revealed weeks before the BBC documentary aired.

As I asked the BBC interviewer: 'Who do you think is more likely right about the Bible Code - an Australian who does not read Hebrew, or the chief of Mossad?' That question does not appear in the documentary. The BBC even cut out the most newsworthy film - a meeting I had with Yasser Arafat on June 10, 2003, amid some of the worst recent clashes between Israel and the Palestinians.

During that meeting, I asked Arafat on camera if he believed in the Hebrew code in the Holy Book of his enemy. He answered me plainly and unambiguously in English: 'Definite.' In that same meeting - in a week that 50 Israelis and Palestinians died, and growing conflict-threatened to derail any hope of Middle East peace - I told Arafat that, according to the Bible Code, there was no choice but 'peace or annihilation' for Christians, Jews and Moslems alike.

And what was Arafat's reply? He told me he was ready to make peace with Sharon 'today'. Yet all the BBC showed of that dramatic film at Arafat's embattled headquarters in Ramallah was a few quick seconds, with me warning him that 'terrorism could actually bring on the destruction of our entire world'.

Arafat's replies, and the proof of how seriously he takes the Bible Code, were not broadcast. Why? Why would any TV network leave out its best film?

Why would it hide the truth that world leaders take the warnings in the Bible Code seriously, and meet me to find out what the code predicts even while at war?

Why would the BBC hide the proof that the code is real? This is what I wrote to BBC Director-General Greg Dyke about the editor of the Horizon series, Matthew Barrett, and his documentary: 'I can prove that the BBC, knowing the truth, did not tell it. But what puzzles me is why the BBC should behave like this on its flagship science series.

'I can't read minds, or I never would have got involved in the first place, but it appears Matthew was so convinced the Bible Code could not exist, he decided to eliminate from the programme all the inconvenient evidence that it does, and instead is about to broadcast claims that have been shown false.

'I realise the basic story told in my books - that there is a code in the Bible that reveals, often in advance, events that happen thousands of years after the Bible was written - is beyond easy belief. But it was discovered by an Israeli mathematician which the BBC itself calls 'brilliant' and of 'unshakable integrity' - and it has been confirmed by a senior code-breaker at the U.S. National Security Agency (not mentioned in the film).

'It is taken seriously by top intelligence officials in the U.S. and Israel. Even Yasser Arafat believes it's real. Instead of showing this, or allowing the mathematician who discovered the code to present it, or defend it, the BBC devotes almost half its programme to attacks easily proven untrue - using only documents and footage already in your hands.' I never heard back from Mr Dyke, nor did the BBC alter its documentary in any way. It promised to tell the truth, and instead it staged an ambush.

Not only did it fail to mention the American code-breaker who confirmed the Bible Code - Harold Gans - but it attacked his experiment without allowing him to defend it.

Gans had started out as a total sceptic and set out to prove the code was a hoax. He wrote his own computer program and tried to replicate the original Rips experiment that proved the code was real - hunting for the names of Jewish sages and the dates when they were born and died.

To his surprise, it worked. Gans still couldn't believe it. So he also looked for the cities of their birth and death, which Rips hadn't checked. He was sure the information would not be there. Instead, he found it - against odds of 200,000 to 1. 'It sent a chill up my spine,' Gans said.

But the BBC never mentioned Gans. Instead, it ran its own rerun of his experiment at London's Imperial College - but not using Gans's data, and instead using data that was known to be flawed by 'dozens of errors' in the names and facts being searched for.

The flawed data had been gathered by a committee of Israeli scientists for their own Bible Code tests. Yet in the words of one committee member, the data had been compiled with such 'extreme carelessness' that any experiments based on it 'lacked any scientific meaning'.

The BBC never passed that warning to the two Imperial College scientists asked to rerun the experiment.

NOR DID the BBC tell its viewers that this supposedly ' independent' test was really secretly arranged with two Bible Code critics, who supplied the data and the computer program to check it.

Yet absurdly, the BBC presented this test - which, unsurprisingly, failed to confirm the code's existence - as 'the definitive Bible Code experiment' and 'an experiment nobody could question'.

The chairman of the Israeli committee, Professor Robert Aumann, told the BBC that the test 'certainly does not show the code does not exist'. But he was not quoted in the documentary.

Aumann told the editor of Horizon that my advance prediction of the Rabin assassination 'is the most convincing evidence for the code I've seen up to now'. But those words were never revealed to BBC viewers.

Aumann also told the BBC that ' successful prediction is the litmus test for validity of a scientific theory'. But that, too, was never mentioned by Horizon. Instead, the BBC claims the Rabin prediction is not 'significant'. I have two observations.

One, Rabin is dead. That is by any measure 'significant'.

Second, the last words I spoke to the BBC on film, cut from the broadcast, remain true: 'There is only one important question - what if the code is real? Because if it is, we have only three years to find a way to save our world.' On the day the BBC broadcast its documentary, I asked it to release the parts it left out - all the best proof that the code is real. The BBC refused. It refused to let me broadcast on another TV network what it hid from the British people, who paid for the film and have a right to see and hear the truth.

When the most respected science documentary series in the world hides the truth - that we may have only three years to prevent World War III - it threatens our survival.

Will the British people demand the BBC reveals the film it suppressed?

* * *

I find it hard to accept that the code's messages are mere "coincidence." There seems to be something more going on here. Is it possible that the Torah, which is essentially the "code" for the Abrahamic civilization, contains within it the instructions for its own demise, much as our DNA can contain the code for our death?

[kris ifans]

Yes, thats the programme I was thinking of.

[daniel]

It seems to me there is something wrong about finding retrospective fragments that seem to connect and then saying "What are the odds against that?" "The odds are ten million to one," etc.

The human brain is designed to scan for and find patterns in data that may be random or inchoate. Given a large enough assortment of patterned information, some significant possibilities will be seen to emerge.

What about all the letters that don't spell out anything? IS that just "junk DNA" in the code?

Anything is possible, and "anything that can be believed is an image of truth," but I would have little interest in a universe that codes aggressively specific doomsday messages and info on Princess Di's death in this nonsensical way. I think it also leads you into a non-creative mechanistic state of mind to spend time with these ideas. As I said, there is also something weirdly passive about it, a kind of consumerist fantasy of how spiritual memes might be parcelled out. Rather than doing the work on yourself, going through self-initiation, which is active death, and therefore understanding the meaning of the apocalypse from the inside, Drosnin creates a computer-based system that increases our psychic dependency on technological contrivances and on "experts" who tell us about more idiotic statistics.

[Phlash]

And speaking of prophecy and the appoclypse...not sure how many of you are familar with Rob Brenzy's Freewill Astrology column or his website, or his amazing, profound and very funny book The Televisionary Oracle, but all are worth checking out. Based on what I've read Rob's head seems to be quite broken. Rob has some archieved writing on his site and this is one of my favorites:

http://www.freewillastrology.com/beauty/beauty.main127.shtml

APOCALYPSE NOW?

DEAR FELLOW MEMBERS OF THE BEAUTY AND TRUTH TRIBE,

I confess that I suffer from a peculiar variety of chauvinism. I'm not zealously inflated about the glory of my religion or region or football team, but rather of the era I live in. I fantasize that our moment in history is more important than all the others that have come before. I harbor the secret hope that those of us alive today are on the cusp of a radical turning point in the evolution of humanity.

It's a little embarrassing. It associates me with wacky millennialists of all stripes, from histrionic New Age prophets to fundamentalist Christians who fanatically await the "end times." And as much as I would like to imagine my views are subtler and more rational than those of the superstitious extremists, I must admit that I sometimes catch myself dreaming of how deliriously interesting it would be if the sour mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as "reality" really did mutate "in the twinkling of an eye," as the Bible insinuates.

Did I scoff at the scaremongers who shivered at the approach of Y2K? Well, yeah, I mostly did. But there was also a Drama King in a dark corner of my psyche who indulged in perversely thrilling fantasies about the possibility that the melodramatic doomsayers might be right. The same is true about my relationship with the Nostradamus wannabes who forecast "earth changes" and a global economic depression in the face of the massive conjunction of planets in Taurus in May, 2000. Ditto the "Cosmic Crucifixion" predicted for August, 1999, when a solar eclipse coincided with a seemingly alarming array of planetary configurations.

And yet there is another part of me, a voice that feels older and wiser, who suspects that even if we ARE on the verge of an evolutionary turning point, even if those of us who are alive today *will* experience the End of Life As We Know It, it just won’t be as simple and obvious and bad as the literalist prophets fantasize. The transformation will not come via some cataclysmic overnight world-wide presto-chango like an asteroid plunging into the earth or the reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles or massive solar flares baking the planet -- or even the most appalling terrorist attack in history.

It is this same part of me -- the older, wiser voice -- who is deeply distrustful of how utterly disposed our culture is to seeing the worst in everything. It amazes me that cynicism is regarded as a supreme sign of intelligence; that Things Falling Apart are inherently more interesting than Things in the Throes of Creative Rebirth. Nineteenth-century poet John Keats once observed that "If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true." But the majority of the prophets, like most of the intelligentsia, the media, and our political leaders, believe the exact opposite: "If something is not ugly, it is probably not true."

Luckily, the jingoistic part of me that yearns to be alive when Everything Changes can find a common ground with the cool eternal part of me that regards the entropy-worshiping, all-or-nothing mindset as a unique signature of the civilization that's dying. Together these two aspects of my psyche can collaborate to conclude the following:

WE ARE INDEED LIVING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE RIGHT NOW.

But it is nothing like the end of the world visualized by any of the usual suspects. It's different in four ways.

1. It is a slow, gradual apocalypse.

2. The apocalypse is usually invisible to most of us, popping into our conscious awareness only on rare occasions.

3. The apocalypse is as much about rebirth as collapse.

4. The primary way most of us experience the apocalypse is through the intimate events of our personal lives.

I'll explore these four points in more detail.

1. THE APOCALYPSE IS HAPPENING IN SLOW MOTION. It has been going on for decades and it will continue to unfold for many years. Sudden, sensational punctuations arise now and then to expedite it, but for the most part it ferments continuously in the background. Most days bring no emergency that is beyond our capacity to bear, but the cumulative effects of the transfigurations that relentlessly weave themselves into our lives have turned every one of us into towering heroes whose courageous endurance dwarfs the valor of all humans who have come before us.

2. THE APOCALYPSE IS FOR THE MOST PART INVISIBLE, and here's the most extreme evidence: Very few of us have registered the fact that we are in the midst of the largest mass extinction of life on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs. This is the conclusion of a poll of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, a professional society of 5,000 scientists. Think of it: Animal and plant species are dying off at a rate unmatched in 65 million years, and almost no one knows -- or grieves.

But the work-in-progress that is the apocalypse is not always cloaked. Now and then a single riveting event transfixes our collective emotions, driving millions of us deep into a visceral realization of just how fragile our hold is on life's sweet mysteries. For a brief interlude, the covert, slow motion upheaval explodes into plain view; the hidden truth becomes an open secret. The Gulf War was one of those events, and 2000's disputed presidential election can be counted as a minor outbreak. Maybe nothing exposed the ongoing apocalypse more poignantly, at least for us Americans, than the mass murder perpetrated by kamikaze hijackers on September 11.

3. THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE WORD "APOCALYPSE" WAS "REVELATION," and in the esoteric spiritual traditions of the West, the apocalypse is regarded as a Great Awakening -- a marvelous resurrection.

I propose that the apocalypse we're living through applies in both the degraded modern sense of the word -- the end of the world -- and in the original sense. In other words, collapse and renewal are happening side by side; calamity and blooming; rot and splendor; grievous losses and unpredictable surges of miraculous novelty. Yes, the end of the old world is proceeding apace; but it is overlapped by the birth pangs of a fresh, hot civilization that will be beautiful beyond all imagining.

Often the horrifying mayhem and the gorgeous regeneration have no link. But in the case of the trauma of last September 11, I propose that they were meshed. My mailbox was filled with emails from people writing to testify about how the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington, D.C. inspired them to live more authentically. Their dedication to creating peace and love and understanding leaped to a higher octave; their petty worries dropped away, leaving them passionately focused on their core spiritual values; they were roused by an electrifying new clarity of purpose, which incited them to stop wasting their time on dead-end, low-priority desires and instead channel all their vital force into accomplishing their most essential goals; and they had direct perceptions -- gut-level, intuitive, soul-enriching gnosis -- that We Are All One.

It's as if millions of people had a simultaneous Near Death Experience and harvested the revivifying fruits that typically come to those who have peered over to the other side of the veil.

Here's another possible example of mayhem and regeneration arising from a single set of events, suggested by healer Caroline Myss in her book *Energy Anatomy:* China's brutal invasion and occupation of Tibet in the 1950s resulted in the exile of the Dalai Lama, which ultimately brought that great soul's influence, along with his beautiful brand of Buddhism, to the entire world with a breadth and depth that would never have happened otherwise.

Can you think of other breakdowns/breakthroughs that fit this description?

4. MOST OF THE TIME WE EXPERIENCE APOCALYPSE NOT THROUGH THE BIG, BAD EVENTS LIKE THE SEPTEMBER 11 MASSACRES, but rather through the details of our personal lives. The radical but gradual revolution, the agonizing death of the old order and slow bloom of the new, are framed in the storylines of your most intimate dramas. Again and again over the years, you are pushed to a brink that challenges you to either rise to the occasion or decay. The crises may come in the form of a divorce or illness or job loss, or even in less dramatic events like a misunderstanding with a friend or the inexplicable waning of a once-passionate dream.

And seeded inside each of these personal turning points is the crux of the ongoing global apocalypse: You get to choose whether you will adjust by taking a path that keeps you in alignment with the values of the dying world or else that makes you hum in resonance with the new civilization that is being born. In effect, you get the chance to vote, with your entire life, for which aspect of the apocalypse you want to predominate.

*

If you've been reading my newsletter in recent months, you know that we've been ruminating on PRONOIA, which is the opposite of paranoia. Pronoia is the unshakable conviction that life is a conspiracy to liberate you from suffering, fill you with joy, and make you really smart.

As sweet and exalted as pronoia feels in our bodies, however, it is not meant to become a force of repression. Pronoia thrives on an engagement with difficult emotions and challenging events, not by ignoring them.

In that spirit, I ask you: How might you respond to the part of the apocalypse that brings collapse and decay? Will it be with actions that express rage, revenge, hatred, tribalism, fear, and all the primitive emotions that have nourished the roots of the dying civilization? Or will it be with actions that express ingenious compassion, creative inclusiveness, expansive empathy, and all the noble emotions that will be at the heart of the new world to come?

A few more questions for you before I conclude:

What will you do to focus your personal experience of the apocalypse on liberation rather than entropy?

How will you respond to the Goddess's invitation to mercy-kill the bad habits and rotting attitudes that interfere with your ability to express your soul’s code -- the blueprint you came to Earth to carry out?

What if there is even a grain of truth in the notion that what we expect will happen tends to come to pass? What if it's insane and stupid to revel in visions of doom to the exclusion of all other scenarios? What if it's dumb and crazy to be entertained by bad news and to ignore and dismiss and be bored by good news?

How can you personally starve the bad apocalypse -- the forces that tend to lead to loss, corruption, and decay? How can you personally nurture the good apocalypse -- the influences that foster redemption, renewal, and reinvention? What leaps of the imagination and creative actions can you take to crush rampant nihilism? What entertaining tricks can you summon to help shape an environment in which it is more fun and interesting to play with boom and zoom instead of doom and gloom?


With rowdy blessings,

Rob

And from this Rob!

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by daniel:
It seems to me there is something wrong about finding retrospective fragments that seem to connect and then saying "What are the odds against that?"But the code isn't only retrospective. The information on the Rabin assassination, for example, was discovered before the event took place. As to the other prospective codes that have been found, I guess we'll find out soon enough whether there's any merit to them.

[Agent Smith]

'christian conjured apocalypse'...

...it's just a projection. yeah SOMETHING is coming, and obviously the yahoos in charge think they know what it is. but it's all just a projection. Kali Yuga is only what you make of it.

...of course, that's only what they're TELLING us what they think...who knows what those lovely people are really up to, eh? after all, if it were me (hmmm, what if it IS, and i don't remember it...like philip k dick... AAAAHHHHH! ...okay sorry...) if it were me, i'd be TELLING you i was going to blow up the world, so that you'd be so worked up about that, you wouldn't notice that i was really hijacking the world's resources for something else altogether...

...one of my favorite newageisms is the idea of the 'wolrd crsytal'...that is that the molten core of the planet is actually a giant molten iron crystal, spining like a magnetic gyroscope, kicking out the reality grid, in the form of ley lines, and manifesting the world according to the program laid down by the previous programmers, who dialed in their notion of reality prior to the crumbling of atlantis... which vanished, *POOF* not merely sank, under the waves... literally written out of existance... so supposedly the last programmer was, TaHuti/Thoth/
Hermes... i mean, why not? makes as much sense as the whore of babylon, the beast, and all that, roit?

...and so what if when we hit galactic central, the mezo-masonic-sino-reptilian order is going to use a massive blood sacrafice to dial in their vision for the next billion years on this here plane? why not? makes as much freakin' sense as your being stuck in a jar of goo, dreamin you're in a computer generated consumerist play ground roit?

...let's come up with a beter plan, shall we. why not manifest the win, win situation for everyone ALL THE TIME? i mean, what else have you got to do today? watch the final episode of "Mad Mad House"? why not just do things right this time?

they've still got the guns, have we got the imagination?

[jezebelle]

agent smith I hear you, well said.