BRIAN
Hi John, I have a bit of a quandary and maybe you can shed some light on it. Does any of this really matter? By “this” I mean all of the horrible stuff occurring in the Middle East and Africa as well as the political and social stupidity happening in the USA and Europe.

I find myself detaching from these events.

I don’t want to get wrapped up in the fear and anger that inevitably surrounds these things and is promoted by the corporate run media with its 24hr news.

What can I do about them?

Surround them with love and live my own life as presently as possible.

That’s what I’m trying to do anyway.

What do you think Osho would say about living in these times?

Hi Brian,
Your comments and questions are so significant and fundamental that I will do my best to share an answer to you and to my worldwide Internet community at large in this article.

To those new to HogueProphecy.com, Osho has been my meditation since 1980. If you find something inspiring in my words you may thank me but I must bow down and thank this dearest and most beloved friend and spiritual mentor for helping me get out of my own way to send these messages. If there is anything of true insight coming through me it is thanks to his meditation techniques that I have been practicing for 31 years and counting. They are tailored to the modern human being and not attempts to force such beings to do a thing most cannot do, simply sit and watch the breath.

Lord Buddha taught such a technique, which he called Vipassana to his 10,000 disciples. Its effect was aided by simpler times 25 centuries ago; his disciples lived agrarian, pre-industrial, pre-internet lives. They did not have as much on their mind, or saw as much outer stimulation of their minds as you or I endure.

To simply sit and watch the breath was possible for them.

For us, Osho suggested, we need help with more active, cathartic dancing and playful meditation steps taken before settling into such a mind watching, breath-by-breath state of meditation can happen.

Never has there been a time more distracting, loud, vulgar and over stimulated than ours. Never has there been a civilization where silence and stillness is avoided like the plague by endless entertainment and hectically paced toil at work, a frantic insatiable desire for more things, more stuff crammed in our homes, thoughts crammed in our heads.

And yet, what Osho and many other great mystics of the past have witnessed prophetically about out times is that our only salvation from a civilization-wide breakdown of humanity is a breakthrough that rediscovers the still, silent point of the witnessing and eternal consciousness. By reconnecting with this presence threading through all the moments of our lives in action and inaction, we might guide our destiny, this moment, every moment, peacefully and intelligently forward.

With the advent of the 21st century, we have entered the age of breakdowns. The age of the old humanity approaches its crash.

A new humanity is like a potential trapped within the dead seed shell that will not yield to the light, to the flowering for many centuries, up until now.

The shell of the past is cracking. I see it all around in the turmoil, in the traditions and dogmas I was trained to blindly believe in and follow. I cannot be so blind anymore to the sights and sounds of dead seed shells cracking all around.

The world of the old humanity is a husk of habit coming undone and crumbling all around us. It must happen. It is right. How else will the seed of our greatest destiny, to become a spiritually and physically balanced human race, happen unless the seediness of the past breaks down?

I feel that Osho spoke to this process of global breakdown leading to global breakthrough when he issued this prophecy 28 years ago:

***

Osho in Greece, 1986.

Man is now living in his most critical moment and it is a crisis of immense dimensions. Either he will die or a new man will be reborn…It is going to be a death and resurrection. Unless human consciousness changes totally man cannot survive. As he is right now he is already outdated.

…During this period there will be every kind of destruction on Earth including natural catastrophes and man manufactured auto-suicidal efforts. In other words there will be floods which have never been known since the time of Noah, along with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and everything else that is possible through nature. The Earth cannot tolerate this type of mankind any longer. There will be wars which are bound to end in nuclear explosions, hence no ordinary Noah’s ark is going to save humanity.

…The Holocaust is not going to be confined to certain places, it is going to be global so no escape will be possible. You can only escape within and that’s what I teach. I do not teach worship of God or any other ritual but only a scientific way of coming to your innermost core.

***

In 1999, I published the following commentary inspired by Osho’s prophecy. It might be good to review it today, five days before the next Earth Day celebration and review it once again, especially the day after Earth Day that happens every 22 April since 1970 in America and when the Earth Day celebration became an international phenomenon in 1990. Since that time, people all over the world come together to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s natural environment. When all the tree hugging festivals celebrating the natural world and offering demonstrations of eco-friendly solutions to sustain our common future have partied out on Earth Day, 22 April 2011, on will come the Earth Day After. It will come shorn of pomp and circumstance, parades and parties and all the propagated tricks to hold a momentary collective attention around the world to the greatest challenge set before us every Earth Day after day: to sustain our continued future on this Earth without destroying its ecological balance.

Stay attentive, humanity at large, on these 364 uncelebrated days each year since 1970 that mark a year from one Earth Day to the next. Keep your awareness constant; come collectively together in the work to sustain your future on this imperiled planet. This world will long survive you, but it is in doubt whether you and your civilization will survive Earth’s response to human abuse.

Osho’s Noah’s Ark of Consciousness prophecy was first published at Rajneeshpuram in 1983. I was there 28 Earth Days ago. I published my comment below in 1999, twelve Earth Day celebrations ago. I print it again just five days before Earth Day number 31 commences.

The coming decades of the early 21st century could see all of us writhing under an Internet of history’s first global emergency. No region, no nation, and no person on Earth will be exempt from the effects of another person’s misuse or overuse of the planet. The next 30 years will endure floods not seen in recorded history — if not directly from weather then from rising coastlines. Prophets foresee earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even many scientists predict other natural disasters of a scope and magnitude never before encountered. It will be as if the Earth were rebelling against a humanity that chooses to remain retarded while it waits for the saviors to fix them. Nostradamus and other seers have predicted a plague of seventy wars across the world, triggered by the breakdown of water and food resources caused by rampant overpopulation. Many of these wars will end in nuclear explosions and the unleashing of biological and chemical-weapon plagues.

Attempts to escape may not only be futile but result in a missed opportunity. A major theme promoted by more renegade redeemers…is that you cannot escape from yourself. No matter how high the [Christian] Rapture carries you into the clouds — no matter how many Himalayan Mountains you can pull over your head to escape the disasters — the problem comes along for the ride.

You are the problem.

And you could be the answer.

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

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

We will have to become our own saviors.

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

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

It is the ark of consciousness within each of us.

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

The path I follow to a Noah’s Ark of Consciousness is meditation.

Osho began teaching me these meditations in 1980. If you would like me to share information about Osho’s meditations, Contact Me.

Brian at the opening of this blog had asked, “What would Osho say?”

My answer is this: I think he would say meditate and be in the herenow. Before, during and after Earth Day, celebrate life in all its dimensions. Every day is a Day on Earth where one can be available to be a clear and consciously compassionate witness of the body, the mind and the world. Relax into that still point. That is the Noah’s Ark of Consciousness.

John Hogue

(17 April 2011)

PS–Earth Day approaches and Mother Nature is already sending us a message with violent, record breaking winter storms double the intensity and the frequency of 2010, rolling across the US every week through January into March. Now in April record floods hit the Red River in North Dakota and the grain belts of Canada a third year in a row. Winter storms become springtime phalanx after phalanx of super cell, globally warmed spring thunderstorms marching across two thirds of the United States every three to four days.

The most recent charge of thunderstorms ravaged wide areas of the US Southern states from Thursday through Saturday (14-16 April), killing over 40 people. The worst death-dealing destruction happened yesterday (Saturday) when Raleigh, and a number of other towns in North Carolina were smashed by a battle line of thunderstorms armed with tornadoes crashing across the Carolinas, Virginia, Delaware and southern New Jersey before heading out into the Atlantic. The season is early and already over 200 tornadoes have been reported, many of which are scouring a new “tornado alley” through states on the US-Canadian border, hundreds of miles farther north than the climate in previous years has allowed. Earth Day next Friday may very well be Mother Nature’s day of rage against human behavior towards the Earth, its oceans and its climate as I foresaw in weather predictions for 2011, such as this one, published back on 21 December 2010:

There’s a war on. A war against stupid.

In 2011, we enter year two of World War Three, Mother Nature’s war on us. This isn’t some pagan voodoo threat. The natural world is ill. It’s fighting back madder than ever in 2011. Her fevers will be hotter this coming spring and summer, her chills colder this winter, her flood of monsoon tears and cyclonic rages will redouble from what was seen in 2010.

Predictions for 2011
The Final Chapter: Alarm Bells Sound the Unsustainable

Chiyono.

Friends,
We live in ever more irrational times. The mass hysteria that carried Barack Obama and the Democrats into power in 2008 may be the same mass hysteria that will take the Democrats out of the House of Representatives “and” the Senate in the midterm election of 2010. A mass mob mindedness in 2008 could be carried away by a slogan of allusive “change” left nebulous and undefined that one could “believe in” — in other words supported by a qualified ignorance of what that change exactly is. The seduction worked on the largest body of swing voters in America, the slightly right-of-center unaligned independent voters who see the Democratic and Republican parties as two faces of a hydra-like monster that is a duopoly.

Independent Texas Congressman Ron Paul reflected in Time Magazine last month that there was no such thing as a duopoly and that in 2008 he was forced to wear the label “Republican” just to be heard.

“We don’t have a two-party system, ” concluded Paul. “We have a one-party system. Both parties endorse the welfare state and corporatism. Both parties support interventionism overseas. But they also write all the campaign laws. So they have made it virtually impossible to break into the monopoly. If I had run on a third-party ticket I wouldn’t have been in the debates.”

The conspiracy of this political monopoly is the subject of Chapter One of my newest almanac of yearly prophecies: Predictions for 2011. I call the monopoly “Politicorp”. The upcoming midterm elections are an attempt by this new aristocracy merging big business with big politics to manipulate the same public hysteria that saw independent voters go all bright eyed and bushy Obama “tales” about vaguely defined change. Now they coax this hysteria to swing to the right for a new nebulous change they can believe in: throw the bums out and get government out of their lives.

In the name of your mood swings of change, the independent voter is being used to dismantle the US Constitution rather than renew it by an emerging plutocracy I have called in predictions for 2008, 2009 and 2010 a CEOlygarcy. This plutocracy wants you to be attracted by slogans of platitudinous or cathartic change whether it herds you to the left in 2008 or to the right in 2010. They want your minds distracted. They want you lurching around like fools. The last thing they want are citizens of a resurrected democracy who are soulful masters of their own potentially self-centered and sentimental minds. They cannot succeed against a voting public that is grounded, centered, truly knowledgeable of their constitutional rights and ever vigilant watchdogs regarding “anyone” with power over them, whether it is a smiling, charismatic narcissistic US president in Washington DC or a Tea Party Wahoo! from Wasilla, AK.

Shortly after the 2008 elections “Anna” left this comment for a blog I did for Thanksgiving Day 2008 called The Thanksgiving of Dark Times Approaching. I invite you to read it in preparation for my answer to Anna. Much of what I predicted two years ago is more topical for a far different world coming in November 2010.

ANNA:
Thank you for writing about a topic, which has been very much on my mind.

You write: “We have not been totally here and now enough to move on.” I instantly flashed on those words and understood the meaning. Those words really helped me in my spiritual struggle to understand.

HOGUE:
Dear Anna, I’m glad it helped. The “insight” was not mine, as such, but it came through me from something much brighter, silent and harmonious than my ego self.

The joy of a medium is to be a conduit to higher consciousness.

The deeper joy knows that all of us are vehicles for the divine 24/7. It only needs us to see what Osho used to call our habit of “being Buddhas pretending not to be.”

And it need not put on airs of oracles and prophecy. This simple yet transforming way of being a medium for existence can be your moment-to-moment state of consciousness and love, whether one is doing ordinary or extraordinary daily things, or just doing nothing, or just sleeping, waking. Digging the weeds, cleaning the bathroom, falling in love, rising in love. What in us can watch the movement of so many thoughts, emotions of the sixth sense and the hectic passage of the outside world beyond our five senses if it isn’t something very still and abiding?

Do the bestirred images broken in a thousand fragments upon the fountain’s watery surface, fall into calmer image when water begins to still? And in the glass-like surface of silent water, does one not see images as they are? Does one not see the moon reflected in the water, as it is?

Yet, this is only a reflection.

I am reminded of an unguarded moment of Zen mistress Chiyono, slowly, carefully walking with her bucket of water held between her hands. She wasn’t looking where she was going but gazing down and marveling at the moon’s reflection in bucket water. Suddenly the binding of her bamboo bucket snapped and the bucket fell apart, water running off in rivulets momentarily sparkling with fragments of moonlight at her bare feet before the dark earth soaked it up.

No reflection. No moon. Emptiness sudden. Immediately was she IN! No water, no moon, no “Chiyono.” Just enlightenment witnessing with empty hands. The observer observed.

Can we go about our day, night, and days to follow, moment to moment a witness?

The answer is lived.

Those who live it will give birth to a new humanity. Not in hundreds of years like some prophets believe, but in the only time in which the new humanity lives. The time is now. The new human is “you” — right here, right “now.” Every “now.”

No waiting. No new age. The new humanity is already waiting there in the emptiness of your hands.

John Hogue

(21 October 2010)

Now the fight over the right to drag threads over or off one’s face may drag France into a period of high security alert this October. The Internet and cell phones are alight with traffic heating up faster than an Apple G4 microprocessor. What heats it up are rumored concerns of an imminent, Mumbai style attack planned by al-Qaeda operatives from North Africa. They may unleash suicide commando raids gunning down and grenade stoning apart crowded and iconic public places across Germany and France. Both countries are on high alert though American government sources are less concerned about alarming Americans abroad.

Perhaps American intelligence keeps alive an old pattern from nine years ago. French intelligence was monitoring the same kind of email and cell phone traffic on 10 September 2001. They tried to warn their opposites in the CIA and Pentagon. The latter were still scratching their heads about taking French warnings seriously when on the following morning (September 11th) a Boeing 757 jet full of hijacked civilians of American Airlines Flight 77 swooped down at grass-top level at over 530 mile per hour. The raped jet struck the west face of the Pentagon like a lightning bolt from the blue turbaned al-Qaeda Talibani.

Is a large-scale attack coming soon to the European tourist destination nearest to you?

My oracle says not in October. Look out for November because it is the 11th month and the al-Qaeda inspired jihadists love to mark their targets on dates playing with the numbers 11, 9 and 7. Be mindful of days like 11/6 (upside-down “9/11″) or 11/7 or 11/9. Remember to mark these days on the European calendar as 7/11 and 9/11/10. You can read more about it in an eBook about 2010, click here: terrorist attack.

Whatever the numbers, Guy Fawkes (the English terrorist who planned to blow up English Parliament at the end of the 16th century) is a jihadi Shaheed (Muslim martyr) in our times. He is in search of a kafir (infidel) target to powder keg. It may not be British Parliament on his hit list to be blown all-a-sinders, but to paraphrase the famous Guy Fawkes rhyme, “Remember, remember, any night in November” 2010 as a time to be extra vigilant against terrorist attacks in Europe, in America, and especially in India. Be watchful where many Western tourists and/or Western disciples of Eastern teachers gather in ashrams or meditation resorts from Mumbai, Pune or down in Bangalore. Meditation and awareness is your greatest defense against terror of all kinds — jihadist or the greater terror of being under the sleepwalking influence of a conditioned mind.

Terrorists are watching you as you watch your selves. They are waiting for your awareness to loosen, for your security guards to be withdrawn. Stay alert in November and all will be well.

A terrorist is like black magician. He needs the victim to unconsciously give his or her power away to his fearful bluff of cursing. A terrorist is an unconventional warlock, ever vigilant for a moment of weakness in which to strike. A curse works because you give it your energy. An act of terror works only when you give your watchfulness away.

***

Back on 8 August I received an email from “RA” about another kind of terror. The kind people sometimes vent when a “spiritual terrorist” shares an insight that can blow up one’s apple cart of borrowed beliefs. There are good terrorists as well as bad. The good shock us out of our false reveries and pretenses. They blow up the foundations of our under-”mind”, which are the twin towers, parliaments and pentagons of borrowed knowledge, identities and dogmas imposed on our innocent, nascent, birth-given intelligence. I have known such a spiritual terrorist and I aim to become one.

RA
I listened to your comments on Nostradamus on a History Channel special called the Nostradamus Effect. Your commentary was quite interesting, so I went to find a book or two by you and was surprised at how virulent some people seem to be when it comes to your work. I’ve found that when many voices are raised to silent one voice, there’s usually something interesting to pursue there. Not always, but often. Why do you think some people have taken such a critical view of your work.

HOGUE
Thanks for your letter today, RA. I receive many letters each day. Many of them are unconsciously motivated and driven by narcissistic projections of the letter writer who either praises me because my round peg by chance happens one day to fit their round whole of biases. Other readers react against me because my round peg by chance pinches their square whole of preconceived antithesis. With time, nearly every narcissistically positive commentator on my writings will eventually find I do not fit with his or her projections, thus I am rejected off handedly. With time, nearly every calumny-texting, vitriolic emailer will by pure accident of bias find I sometimes do fit with his or her worldview. Then suddenly my credibility is resurrected. My peg at last fits in their whole of mindset.

Your letter, RA, is rare because it contains words composing a thoughtful set of questions and comments that indicate someone who may be a true skeptic; namely, someone who inquires in the spirit of what ancient Greek word skepticos originally meant: “to investigate without prejudice for or against.”

I am not agreeing with what you have said like one of my narcissistic readers. There is a very fine line of difference. I harmonize with what you are saying because it has been my own direct experience not a mere belief upheld without it. How you have sought inquiry is how I also seek it. Whether what I say or who I am resonates with you or not, will have as little or as much value to existence depending on your capacity to delve deep with an open mind and heart of true inquiry into what this John Hogue is all about.

I have come to understand that originality and fresh intelligence can act like sand rubbing raw the oyster or it can act like a brush combing against the grain of what is traditional, robotic and politico-spiritually correct. Like you, when faced with a thinker or mystic or any figure in any field of endeavor that stirs a large and virulent protest from all sides, rather than join in the chorus I am compelled to learn for myself who that person is and what they are saying. Such universal controversy is a sign that something new and important may be hiding just under the surface related to the target of all-sides, negative attention.

I look at history. When has the new been easily embraced by the status quo in any dimension of life? When has progress in human consciousness not met resistance? Of course there is always the danger that controversial figures are being irritating just because it satisfies a recalcitrant ego trip. Then again, not all gold is pyrite. Not all pearls are plastic. It is worth the risk to inquire further into a man or a woman at the center of so much controversy from all sides. The passion of detractors can indicate that a nerve has been touched, a tradition exposed or illusion’s sleep disturbed. So off I go to directly understand that person who stands alone as a majority of “one” against the crowd. Does he or she become this out of hubris, or authentic and progressive humanity flowering from within?

Originality is by its essence a force that undermines complacent status quo thinking, feeling and experiencing. We seem embodied in a mortal universe (perhaps not the only universe around) that is wired to resist progressive evolution of thought and spirit. Yet it evolves. The sand chafes the oyster, yet from time to time pearls of great beauty and richness arise. Unconsciousness exerts the pressure of form-ality that turns coal into diamonds. Mediocrity and conform-reality have their parts to play. The question is, for each of us to contemplate: Am I choosing to be a force of form-ality; or, am I the diamond in the rough, in the making? Am I the garden’s mulch or am I the flowering?

RA
Also, I’m trying to find a copy of your book cited on the History Channel: Nostradamus and the Anti-Christ. Is it published yet?

HOGUE
Yes, RA. I publish it as an eBook. Much of my work now is self-published, because the evolution of my work since I published my last book in paper in 2003 — Nostradamus: A Life and Myth — no longer ingratiates me with the corporate media pigeonhole set for authors and scholars in the prophetic field. I hope to see that change, but I also understood long ago as a tomorrowist that the future of the written word depends upon delivery systems made of photons and electrons stored on screen tablets like Kindle and iPads, not on ink staining the skins of murdered trees. I try to live by the future I foresee, so several years back I began publishing my books as electronic books that I sell at my web site and soon through other electronic avenues.

Here is a link to my web page concerning Nostradamus and the Antichrist (Mabus). It is the second highest ranked page on the topic in the world.

John Hogue

(04 October 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 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, the year of his purported enlightenment.

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 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.”

***

“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 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)

In that blog I began to share some stories about a man who had a chief influence in my spiritual education while visiting this mortal coil. The anecdote and the picture of Osho stimulated a lot of interest, vigorous comment, debate and a few hit-and-run acts of emailed calumny. Many of you seek a clarification about my take on Osho and gurus in general and I feel the time has come to ramp the HogueProphecy narrative up a notch for a few rounds of postings. Let us explore for a bit the higher definition of prophecy beyond being the act of forecasting the future, to prophecy as the message of good news and revelations of eternal truths showered on us by authentic masters. We will still provide each posting of this four-part series with a fix on current events tied to forecasts about and fulfillment of predictions for 2010.

The time has come to define what, in my experience, is an authentic master. What are his or her traits? This is an important thing to share because when one is seeking a teacher suffice it to say one either does not know individual mastery or has discovered he or she cannot go further to know the mystery of existence without some help from those who may have gone before. The path to a master is fraught with danger because we seek them ignorant of the ultimate truth, yet one must trust in that life-and-death urgency of the seeker who at least has come to know that he or she does not know the next step on the journey and needs help.

In my experience, this trust as inner truth compass is not to be confused with faith. They are categorically different. Faith is something borrowed from outside. It is preached to you and you then choose to throw your trust like gambling chips in a “bet” that the priest, guru, or preacher seeking your following may be sincerely borrowing second-hand knowledge of the direct experience of masters who never seek your following. You surrender your spiritual path to an outside idea, a faith, a dogma that takes you away from what I mean by trust.

Real trust is not something from the outside. It comes from the deepest wellspring of inner being. It has no dogma. It has no creed but being. It resonates to truth from the outside as guidance, but it does not surrender itself to the ideas or the borrowed faiths of others. Trust remains a miracle of individual spiritual freedom. It can resonate with others but it cannot surrender slavishly. It can intimately love those who help strengthen trust to stand alone in its own truth. It can be in love relationship with another trusting being where the unique and individual presences stand separate like pillars that uphold the temple of trust’s love beyond the personal limits of either pillar. Trust can be a heroic innocence that has the courage to embrace the unknown and live blissfully in the eternally deepening, cosmic intimacy of the unknowable.

What I love about Osho was the wordless knowing that he was and “is” ever there to anoint and facilitate my trust’s innocent flowering. In the next installments of this new series I will share passages from my book Messiahs: Visions and Prophecies for the Second Coming where I define in my own words what I have experienced are stages in the path to trusting a spiritual teacher. Today, I will close part one with a passage from Osho defining the way he taught his truth:

“My approach to your growth is basically to make you independent of me. Any kind of dependency is a slavery, and the spiritual dependence is the worst slavery of all.

“I have been making every effort to make you aware of your individuality, your freedom, your absolute capacity to grown without any help from anybody. Your growth is something intrinsic to your being. It does not come from outside; it is not an imposition; it is an unfolding.

“All meditation techniques that I have given to you are not dependent on me — my presence or absence will not make any difference — they are dependent on you. It is not my presence but your presence that is needed for them to work.

“It is not my being here but your being here, your being in the present, your being alert and aware that is going to help…

“The whole past of man is, in different ways, a history of exploitation. And even the so-called spiritual people could not resist the temptation to exploit. Out of a hundred Masters, ninety-nine were trying to impose the idea that, ‘Without me you cannot grow, no progress is possible. Give me your whole responsibility.’

“But the moment you give your whole responsibility to somebody, unknowingly you are also giving your whole freedom…

“As far as I am concerned, I am simply making every effort to make you free from everybody — including me — and to just be alone on the path of searching.

“This Existence respects a person who dares to be alone in the seeking of truth. Slaves are not respected by Existence at all. They do not deserve any respect; they don’t respect themselves, how can they expect Existence to be respectful towards them?

“So remember, when I am gone, you are not going to lose anything. Perhaps you may gain something of which you are absolutely unaware.

“Right now I am available to you only embodied, imprisoned in a certain shape and form. When I am gone, where can I go? I will be here in the winds, in the ocean; and if you have loved me, if you have trusted me, you will feel me in a thousand and one ways. In your silent moments you will suddenly feel my presence.

“Once I am unembodied, my consciousness is universal. Right now you have to come to me. Then, you will not need to seek and search for me. Wherever you are…your thirst, your love…and you will find me in your heart, in your very heartbeat.”

Beyond Enlightenment, Chapter 11 (1986)

***

Predictions for 2010 Fulfilled and Oncoming…

When unemployment checks are no longer being cut and delivered:

“Oh, but recovery is at hand, says the corporate editors of your television media, even though General Motors and Chrysler will sag and need more bailouts, or that another hundred banks will close, or despite the deadline for final payout of unemployment checks for millions will enjoy a few last minute federal extensions until after the mid-term elections.”

This Thursday (22 July 2010), 37 weeks and four days after I documented the above prediction, CBS News reported that President Barack Obama signed into law a restoration of benefits for people who have been out of work for six months or more after Congress approved the measure earlier that same day. A stroke of Obama’s pen ended six weeks of unemployment benefits running out on 5 million people in the program. The extension of payments will last until the end of November. The mid-term elections happen on 2 November.

Natural disasters not seen in living memory

Chicago was hit with a Monsoon downpour of 8 to 12 inches overnight, flooding large areas of the city on an a level of violent rainfall that the media is beginning to call the 100-year Chicago flood. It was caused by the subtropical jet stream shifting hundreds of miles north this spring and summer visiting upon Chicago and the northern plains and Great Lake states the kind of tornado and severe thunderstorm weather one might expect along the Gulf of Mexico. Climate watchers have been reporting earlier this year on Earthweek that a globally warming climate has seen the tropics expand north and south of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn bringing subtropical climates as much as 600 miles into what were once northern and southern hemispheric temperate zones. To call what happened today in Chicago a monsoon flood event is more than metaphorical. It is a fact that Chicagoans will have to live with every summer in the coming decades as Mother Nature goes to war with our bad habits that abuse her world. The Chicago monsoon flood today reminds me of what the oracle warned and recorded on 1 November 2009:

“The enemy is our unconsciousness as a species, our willingness to believe rather than know our collective soul, our willful postponement and outright resistance to awakening our responsibility to be gardeners—not rapacious parasites—of this Earth. And, if Mother Earth must, she will scourge us, starting in 2010 through 2011 with a spike in climate change disasters never before seen, bringing to a close this most ominous 00 (uh-oh!) decade of the new millennium. The potential death and destruction of this oncoming war of Earth on us will render every land and ocean a battlefield. Militant Mother Nature on the warpath will deliver more epic horrors and losses than endured in the last global World War and all 3,000 wars in 5,000 years of recorded civilization.”

Read more about Mother Nature’s compassionately hard hits coming this year in Predictions for 2010.

John Hogue

(24 July 2010)

Oh yes, I’ll be there to light a fire under the prophetic bullshit fantastic. I’ll be there to play sympathetic skeptic against the 2012 hysteria. Who knows? I might start a playful riot like I did years ago when I called Dolores Cannon out before a few thousand people to prove if she actually helped her trance clients talk to the living Nostradamus in the 1550s. If you want to be entertained, you will be entertained. If you want more than idle paranormal drivel, then read on.

The most important gift I have to offer you at the Conscious Life Expo is not a talk on Nostradamus uncensored, or an exposition on my views on the prophecy panel or the 2012 panel planned. I have a treasure to give you after my workshop. A treasure I pass on from my meditation teacher, the mystic Osho, given many years ago. It is a revelation whose heartbeat pulses at seven beats a second in indigo light. It is a night meditation called Gourishankar.

Gourishankar is the Sanskrit name for what honkeys of the British Raj renamed the tallest mountain on Earth with one of their impotent, nasal misnomers, “Mt. Eeh-voor-eehst.”

I’m going to give the hour-long Gourishankar meditation done to music after my workshop on Sunday.

This meditation consists of four stages of 15 minutes each. The first two stages prepare the meditator for the spontaneous Latihan of the third stage. Latihan is a mysterious and wonderful moment when one becomes the bamboo flute that existence plays its songs upon. Latihan is the moment when existence dances you. Latihan is the state of being a medium for the beyond. To prepare for this state, one must fly without wings. Osho has said that if the breathing is done correctly in the first stage the carbon dioxide formed in the bloodstream will make you feel as high as Gourishankar (Mt. Everest.)

First Stage: 15 minutes

Sit with closed eyes. Inhale deeply through the nose, filling the lungs. Hold the breath for as long as possible, then exhale gently through the mouth and keep the lungs empty for as long as possible. Continue this breathing cycle throughout the first stage, carried by the transcendent music higher and higher…

Second Stage: 15 minutes

Return to normal breathing and with a gentle gaze look at a candle flame or a softly flashing blue light pulsing at seven beats a second. Keep your body still. (I will bring to this meditation a flashing strobe light thickly filtered to a gentle indigo glow. This is the third-eye color. This stage stimulates one’s inner eye to a soft, warm and welcoming bongo tattoo.

Third Stage: 15 minutes

The light goes off. With closed eyes in the darkness, stand up and let your body be loose and receptive. The subtle energies will be felt to move the body outside your normal control. Allow this Latihan (let go) to happen. Don’t you do the moving: let moving happen, gently and gracefully

Fourth Stage: 15 minutes

Lie down with closed eyes, silent and still.

Osho.

My understanding of this meditation is that it helps one discover how to get out of the way and become a medium of the whole cosmos. What special ways that Cosmos wishes to use us is unique to all participants and is sacred whether the world judges what comes through as great or mundane. I use Gourishankar to aid in my work. You can use it as a technique to get out of your own way and be given by existence what is uniquely your destiny to share. Whatever that blessing may be.

Come meditate with us, Sunday. Go to this link and learn more:

Osho’s Gourishankar (Mt. Everest Meditation)

Room and time will be given at the end of the Work Shop. See more information about the meditation and the workshop here: Nostradamus Uncensored

Here also are my other appearances on Friday and Saturday:

PROPHECY PANEL Humanity’s Future in the Balance?

4 – 6:30 pm, Friday, February 12, La Jolla Ballroom. See Prophecy

2012 PANEL

Hosted by George Noory (COAST TO COAST AM host)

2 – 4:30 pm, Saturday, February 13, Plaza Ballroom. See 2012

John Hogue

(12 February 2010)

Predictions for 2010 here

Osho

Friends,
We’ll close this series today with a tale of two conditioned mind projections: one innocent, the other self-deceiving. After which I will tell you a little story to illuminate.

BJ
Thank you for your recent blog re: Slavery makes us Predictable, Freedom makes us Immortal (Sept. 26-27, 2009). Though colored with a tinge of impatience for dear Charles, it points in the right direction: we must each take responsibility for the kind of world in which we live. Blaming others is ultimately self-defeating — an abnegation of one’s freedom and responsibility. Best to unshackle oneself from the short leash of fearful, if loving, parents. The old adage contains sage advice: “Physician, heal thyself!” One other point: prayer and meditation suggest kindness and compassion is the best form of embrace. Perhaps Charles would have responded more positively had your approach been a bit more gentle and a tad less scolding. A writer’s style sometimes detracts from the message he or she wishes to convey. Reading between the lines, however, my sense is you only wished to help Charles and others more clearly see a better way. God’s speed!

HOGUE
It is not about “winning” people over, BJ. It is about helping people wake up. Compassion is not always appearing kind. Sometimes compassion must appear harsh to be kind. Most of us need a really good kick in the backside of our illusory state. We need shocks. Few of us will immediately thank existence for the shocks. That understanding and gratitude, on rare occasions, comes later.

I scolded Charles because even though the content of his comments were worthy for sharing my response to all of you, I sensed that there was something insincere and adolescent motivating them requiring a literary “stick” of compassion rather than the caress.

As it turned out, Charles finally tried to come clean after my second response (see it at the end of this blog). He made an effort to apologize for not being authentic even though it was more like another shift into another pretense.

This is what he wrote:

CHARLES
Thanks for your [second] email. As for your predictions blog, it is one of my favorites. I very much admire your unique wisdom and insights. As for my comments on your blog, I was just having some fun at your expense. (Everyone who knows me say what a weird sense of humor I have. Oh well, that’s just me.) So I may drop back in from time to time to “give you the business.”

He then ended his letter with a pitch to visit his web site where he would reveal his true thoughts.

Charles’ shape-shifting episodes remind me of a Gurdjieff story my meditation teacher, Osho, used to tell. Here is a variation of it.

***

One day I had come to the front door of a great English manor to visit an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. I gave the door a knock.

After awhile I heard heavy footsteps menacing the door. A large man with dirty Wellington boots and a pitchfork answered the door with a surly voice, “Who the hell are you?!”

“Is the master of the house at home?” I asked.

“I’m the master!” Snapped the grounds keeper, “Get lost.”

He slammed the door in my face.

I came back to the manor again late that afternoon hoping to meet my friend and have a word about his grounds keeper. I braced myself anticipating another rude handling. The door opened and a sweet smiling maid in lacy frock confronted me with duster in hand.

“Hello, what can I do for you,” she said kindly.

“I’m looking for the master of this manor. I’m an old friend come to call unannounced. Is he at home? I had a run-in this morning with the help who was certainly not him and very nasty too.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed.

“Oh! That is Francis the grounds keeper. I’m sorry, sir,” said the housemaid sweetly. “He’s a little eccentric and abrupt with strangers. I do apologize. He doesn’t understand that kindness and compassion are the best form of introduction to strangers.

“You know, as mistress of this house, I have to constantly remind the servants to be a bit more gentle and a tad less scolding to strangers. Because being abrupt sometimes detracts from the message he or she wishes to convey. I’m sure if you could read his heart you would sense that he only wished to help protect my manor from unannounced strangers. Thank you for the visit. Good by…”

The door closed on my face again, albeit quietly this time.

The following morning I marched up to the door intent on finding the underlying cause of this. I was concerned my friend might be a hostage in a madhouse of servants gone bonkers.

I rapped the doorknocker furiously ready to jam my foot in the door and pass the threshold beyond whomever the next idiot was who answered and see to my friend’s whereabouts in person.

A finely groomed butler in morning coat with pinstripe slacks, white tie and tails opened the door. In his hand was a tray with a carafe of brandy and classes.

“Can I be of service to you?” the Butler coolly asked, looking down his monocled nose at me with mildly upturned brow.

“Every time I come to the door, seeking the master of this house, who is my very old friend, I am manipulated or outright accosted by different members of the help who then close the door in my face.”

The butler brooded over this and my mention of my friend’s name and his current whereabouts, looking off, framing his thoughts in some corner of the porch ceiling.

“Hmmm, hmmm… I see,” remarked the butler. “Well then, it is very simple, the answer, that is. Any child could understand what is happening in this manor. The man you speak of is away. He hasn’t been present for years.”

The butler took on an urgent look, then leaned forward conspiratorially looking askance, not wanting to be overheard as if he knew he was being watched. I leaned in too. Perhaps something frightful was happening in this mansion. Perhaps they were all hostages and were made to send strangers off with their eccentric behavior. I anticipated the butler would whisper the real circumstances to a stranger who might then run off and get help.

“You know,” said the butler, “This is a madhouse, really. The maid, the groundskeeper, even the chef, the limousine driver…They all think that once your friend had left this house they each had become master of this manor. Quite daft, the lot of them.”

He then stiffened and stepped back from me adding imperiously, “Of course you and I know they are wrong. We both know that ‘I’ am the master of this manor. Good day to you, sir, please do not come again…”

The door closed a third time in my face.

***

This is our state, each one of us. The master is not home so our servant personalities run the manor. Don’t judge Charles too harshly if he shows more than one false face during this three part series: existential philosopher, then hurt replier, and at last sucking up to me and playing merry prankster, peddling his web site.

He is us. He is you. A collection of false personalities burying the eternal being. The master has fallen asleep inside the mansion of body-mind. The “manor” is therefore left to the chattering, competing help. Once meditation awakens Him, the servants resume their proper places as the master’s help.

I yet again offer Charles, and all of you, the invitation to try out the meditation techniques that have helped me begin to put my house in order. Many of you have already asked during the publication of this series. I will come back with a personal response to each one of you when work on Predictions for 2010 allows.

John Hogue

(Nietzsche’s Birthday — my initiation into Meditation 29 years ago today — 15 October 2009)

It is, however, to President Obama’s credit that he immediately acknowledged that he was unworthy of such a prize though he lacked the maturity and courage of a great man to reject it until it had been earned. Neither I nor indeed he thinks this award is helpful in his efforts to bring on change we believe for the world. The prize will become just another heavy expectation put over his shoulders. He is responsible for donning these ever heavier rewards of karmic consequence that are the result of a presidential candidate in 2009 promising an idea of change without a lot of substantive experience as a leader to bring such change about.

I have been making the following predictions on radio and writing the following since early 2007. You can verify them in my blog archives or by readingPredictions for 2008 or Predictions for 2009 or Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named; MABUS:

Barack Obama has the potential to become a great president, but if he comes to office in 2008, he arrives to his destiny four years too soon. I added in early 2008 that tragedy for Obama and the United States might be the historic consequence of being too green and inexperienced for the job.

I am more hopeful now, oracularly speaking that he will not die in office but live to win a second term (as far-fetched as that might read to many of you right now — remember I said it here.)

I do not know how he will achieve this, but my oracle hints that it will be given to him by the further radicalization of the Republican Party, straying far right and politically wrong headed from its conservative values. Moreover, Obama will have some mixed successes in his first term. A messed up “Health Care Insurance” reform bill will be seen in difficult years to come as an improvement by 2012 to no reform at all. He will be fighting hard for a public option by 2012 with the people on his side against Congress and they will literally have to go to the streets of Washington DC to get it.

I have said that Obama has a Lincolnesque karma. Like Lincoln, Obama’s first term will be filled with mistakes and disasters (more in the social and economic front than on Lincoln’s military front, though). He is not yet showing Lincoln’s greatness or fortitude at learning the job whilst his head is on fire, so to speak. A little more adrenaline in no drama Obama and the Ameri-can’t people’s veins might hasten historic changes. Worse shocks for president and people are necessary. They are coming. They are necessary, Ameri-cans. But enough of this for now.

Comments on ‘Prophecy Slaves’–2

Today I begin writing at a breakneck pace on Predictions for 2010 so that it will be posted for you the day after Thanksgiving. Not so far away. The rest of the blog, therefore will consist of a further selection of reader-to-hogue discussions about that blog where Darth Vader plays with his food.

Now to a reader named James:

JAMES
What is said here is simply self-reliance. you wanna get it together? then seek it within. It doesn’t come some ‘church’, or government, media, family, etc. Lao Tzu called it: Wu-Wei, emptying the soul as an open bowl ready to be filled. Thru this open-ness only are you filled. You have to empty your soul of all the instilled crap that society has crammed you with & backup & start over to be filled with the truth. It is simply re-learning your spiritual-man as opposed to the material man that has come to know nothing but self-gratification. Christ said that the kingdom of heaven is ‘within you’. It’s inner not outer. Inner must be re-learned to change the outer-man. Not hard to figure out, really!

HOGUE
James, here, has it all figured out. Meditation illuminates this as another trap of the mind. The question is not “what is said here is self-reliance”, the question is who here is saying that it is

Who is this “James” and who are you “John Hogue” and who are you, reader, that judges, enlightens, pontificates, loves or hates

It doesn’t matter how right what James or John Hogue says is, or that James even discusses the values of Wu-Wei or that John Hogue here would like to add to James’ introduction that Lao-Tzu is one of the great enlightened masters of meditation. “I” doesn’t matter, reader, whatever you judge about this blog, or wish to pontificate, love or hate these words before you.

What matters is knowing and remembering who is reading this.

Who is IN… this

NANCY
[Charles said to us,] “How can ordinary people be responsible for their actions when the government, the establishment media, and the establishment educational system feed people lies piled on top of lies?

This is a very sad commentary on humankind, eh?

However, you can be different [Charles], read between the lines and draw your own conclusions, trust in your instincts.

HOGUE
This is often the rationale of the mind. And most people stop there and are comforted. But can this comfort enlighten? Nancy, you make a well-known statement. We all make it sometime in our lives. But if it were true and if it were enough to “think” it, then the world would not be the misery-field it is for humanity. This beautiful statement “trust your instincts” must therefore be just a bromide for spiritual indigestion for most of us.

As beautiful as such statements are it takes us away from the ultimate question and answer:

Who is this mystery that “trusts instincts”?

Now to a broader comment about instincts:

BOB
I was interested to read Charles’ message and your response in your Sept 26th Blog entry. The one thing Charles needs to understand in the equation is the fact that humans are mammals. That means, of course, alpha male/female leadership, group over individual, conformity over novelty, suppression of conscience over trusting innate consciousness and group everything. Charles may be a typical human mammal. He needs the official group word and “wisdom” for direction to what ideas and events are OK to “think” about and accept. Human mammals never seem to transfer into their daily life the narrative in literature and film of the outsider non-conformist having the knowledge, wisdom, awareness and novelty of though to not just accept the directives and recognize what is wrong or needs changing. The Charles’ of the world simply do not recognize the alternatives to what they are told is acceptable. They can only think and believe within the parameters set for them by those who control them. Perhaps I am too harsh in my assessment, but the truth remains.

HOGUE
Meditation has revealed to me how deep is our assumption that we are human. Indeed, it may be shocking — and it is certainly still shocking to me — to see just how profound and deep is the animal programming that we habitually are trained to see as human traits. Most of them are not. Here are some examples:

Nationalism is the end result of animals peeing and musking their territory. Your flag is your rack of antlers.

The overlords and overwhelmed in human society are the Alpha males and females dominating a pack of wolves

Fashion used to make one attractive is the new feather of color evolution. And, even though we are living in one of those odd human periods when men are not the peacocks, such as you see in 18th and early 19th-century European history, it takes no Nostradamus to predict that men will once again sink happily back into their animal natures and rooster-up more cock-sure-colorful than the “hens.”

The modern and enlightened Sufi Dervish, Suleyman Dede, once defined human beings as “talking animals” unless they can reconnect with that still small point within. He used to whirl around in a circle to find that still small point. I also find it there in the eye of the spinning body-mind when whirling. I’ll close today with his words about the Sufi Whirling meditation:

“If you are quiet and in a state of prayer when you Turn, offering everything of yourself to God, then when your body is spinning, there is a completely still point in the center…The heavens respond; and all invisible kingdoms join in the dance. But the world does not understand. They think we Turn in order to go into some sort of trance. It is true that sometimes we do go into that state you call ecstasy, but that is only when we know and experience at the same time.

“We do not Turn for ourselves. We turn around in the way we do so that the Light of God may descend upon the earth. As you act as a conduit in the Turn, the light comes through the right hand, and the left hand brings it into this world…We turn for God and for the world, and it is the most beautiful thing you can imagine.”

Suleyman Dede, “Why We Turn,” Lovers of Mevlana, vol. 2, no. 4 (Winter, 1997).

John Hogue

(12 October 2009)