The New
Millennium:

Or Bloomsday?

 

I do not yet know “who” I am but meditation allows me to often see “how” I am.

Through understanding the hows of my happiness-sadness-love-and-hate, I observe their rough-and-tumble within me with greater distance. Meditation helps me to watch the movement of my thoughts and emotions. I become more a spectator than a participant in stress, pain, and denial. Through meditation I have been able to uncover the root cause of all my misery: The fear of change, and lurking behind that, the ultimate fear–the fear of death. Meditation has helped me observe the mechanics of misery and fear.
There’s a Sufi metaphor about identification. Misery doesn’t come to us, we unconsciously seek it out and hold on to it, like flinging our arms around a pillar. As we squeeze tighter we yell, “Oh, if I only could be rid of this misery and pain!”

This misunderstanding is our choice. As American mystic Adi Da once remarked, we “do” misery, we “do” expectation. Hell is not a place, we “do” it.

My own journey into meditation and spiritual rebellion began from a nasty experience I had as a seven year old, when I moved to a new school in a new neighborhood.

I was in love with the little girl sitting next to me in my second-grade class. When she was moved to another spot in the classroom, I was brokenhearted. The teacher, like many adults I knew then (and now), liked to hide her fears behind a facade of power. She looked as big as her fear, and when she demanded to know what was the matter with me, I didn’t speak in words but in pain, and sobbed into my hands. My expression of naked feeling elicited from kids and teacher alike an immediate wave of hostility and derision. For weeks after that event, I was treated with disgust and fear as some kind of “thing.”

During an atomic air raid drill for World War III–so common in the years following the Cuban Missile Crisis–I accidentally bumped into the largest kid in the class while groping in the dark classroom for my place to “duck and cover” myself. His immediate reaction was to slug me in the stomach. Crying, doubled over in agony, I asked him why he hit me. Still a kid and not yet completely formed into the proper masked and label-loving adult, he was struck by the blow of my existential question.

“I don’t know!” he blinked, bewildered. “It’s what dad told me to do. When you’re hit, hit back.”

That was my first hard lesson in programming.

It got worse. When he and a gang of kids would chase me off the playground every recess with tether balls and stones, I had to run my little ass into a nearby storm drain trench. As I huddled there, I was forced to face the reality that people were neither sane nor loving; they only pretended to be. The children would forget about me and wander back to the swings and sandboxes, but I could never forget this heartbreaking truth, heartbreaking because it set me apart from people. It made me aware that I am alone.

But no bitter experience is without its sweetness. Crouching in the trench, chin buried in the pungent grass, with tearful, wide eyes gazing at dancing clouds in a silent sky, I also became aware that Nature did not - could not - reject me. It was more than a friend, it was a beloved. As I became aware of my aloneness, Nature accepted it. Was it.

After that I could not see fear in Nature, only innocence. There is no judgment in Nature’s stases and catastrophes. It is unnatural man, divided against the Self, who judges them. There is life, death, violence and peace flowing from animals, Earth and plants. They don’t judge or feel divisions like we do. The rosebush doesn’t compare itself to the lotus and commit suicide. In fact, no animal except man commits suicide or indiscriminately slaughters its own kind. We compare, and throw our minds and hearts into the turmoil of division. This division becomes projected onto all of our relationships with other human beings and with the Earth. As we become more and more split off from our fellow humans and from the planet, we create all the conditions that draw us closer to death, personal and global.

The insights of my personal apocalypse made it hard for me to buy into all the ways people suppress the natural within and destroy the ecology of Earth with their fearful greed. A new and tender consciousness arose that at the time had no words. Looking back on it years later, I realized it was then I made the commitment that has forever sabotaged my efforts to embrace life as it is socially presented and commonly accepted. That is why I never succeeded in opera or fit with anyone’s projections and expectations.

I somehow understood in my child-mind that a truly natural, spiritual person would be as silent as that sky, as playful as those eddying clouds, as rich with the fragrance of wisdom as the grass cushioning my chin. A natural human being, like the grass, could not dictate or push his or her fragrance on others but would simply be unable to contain it.

In the intensity of that terrible moment of rejection, Nature showed me how to sniff out the unbearable lightness and sacred light of a natural and ordinary, human being. These flowers in humanity’s manure field would possess the silence of Nature and an equanimity in the face of Nature’s two polar complementaries–destruction and creation. I would instinctively recognize these enlightening-up people by their laughter and celebration uncaused, by the gleam of a second and consciously recognized childhood sparking in their eyes. I would know them if their silent gaze and presence were not disturbed by fame or infamy, riches or poverty, life or death. They would remain inwardly blissful, unaffected by life’s vagaries or any attempts by those outside of their silence to abuse and disturb them. These natural human beings would be happy in a palace or in the dirtiest holding cell. And if sadness on rare occasions came to their doors, they would watch it rather than indulge it, until sadness moved on.

I have spent the bulk of my adult life traveling around the world in search of such men and women. I have found them. Many of their quotes about the human condition and its future appear in my books. They are my criterion for saying you and I are unnatural.They have also showed me–in their unique ways–that meditation, the science of self-observation, is the only medicine that can cure the insanity we have become and give us back a future.

I do not ask or expect you to believe me. In fact, there is no point in either believing or debunking what I’m saying without a sincere and intimate investigation on your own.

I am satisfied with the ongoing process of my own apocalypse. I have met a few members of the genus Homo novus (the new humanity foreseen by many prophetic traditions) and their fragrance is meditation.

The words “meditation” and “medicine” have the same ancient root. One heals the body, the other the soul. If we look from a more occidental angle, the words “meditation” and “mechanic” also have the same roots. If you can watch your entire mental-emotional engine without getting caught in its grinding gears, if you can see it as the dispassionate and watchful “mechanic,” you will then find ways to fix your “engine.” It will start working for you rather than disturb your ride through life.

The study of the world’s meditation techniques and religions naturally expanded into a study of prophecy. I first became interested in predictions out of fear. Fear that an apocalypse was unavoidable. At that time in the early 1970s, I felt no responsibility for my planet or myself in the matter of its survival. I was reading every prediction made in the last 10 millennia just to see if there was a safe place to weather the coming holocaust expected for the year 2000.

As the years passed, the addition of meditation in my life revolutionized my study of prophecy and the occult. As a result of practicing this inner science I became aware that no safe place exists for anyone except within the still point of consciousness itself. I have come through this 30-year study of predictions recognizing that each of us is responsible for the misery and auto-suicidal tendencies that could destroy this beautiful planet. In other words, each of us does our part to create either doomsday or a blooms day in the early decades of the 21st century.

It is my experience that prophecy works because we are predictable. Conditioning each new generation to blindly follow our habits and traditions without questioning them only condemns our children to be as predictable and tragic in their future history as we have behaved in history’s past. As I said earlier, I don’t believe we’ve ever had a future. We recreate the past and call it the future, with all of its predictable traps

So far we have failed to fix our world because we deal with the symptoms not the ‘dis-ease’ itself. We need a new science of self-observation so it can become aware of the roots of our suffering. Only this understanding, shared by millions across the Earth, can alter human destiny for the better. As I see it, if humanity wants a future – rather than a regurgitated past – it will have to be deprogrammed and deconditioned. In the next 30 years, Society’s habit of turning every enlightened child into a manageable mediocrity will have to end, or civilization will collapse from stresses coming from pollution and overpopulation. If people can free themselves from their fossilized religious and traditional conditioning then the new humanity of the next century will be spontaneous and unpredictable.

You cannot predict what untethered intelligence and love will do next. Perhaps that is why so many of history’s proven seers witness so few events beyond the first decade of the next century. Rather than 2012 being the date that time ends, as certain prophetic traditions and pop-Apocaloids believe, humankind begins to free itself from its past conditionings and therefore its future cannot be easily foreseen.

With this said, it is always important to remember that we live in no other time but this atomic and eternal moment. A study of prophecy should not nurture our future-oriented obsessions. Doomsday or a Golden age of peace never comes today. They are potentials of the living present. I propose that a study of prophecy has value if we use the foreseen future potentials as the reflections of our present actions. Only in the present do we have the power to change tomorrow. Only by living totally in this moment do we have a chance to avoid tomorrow’s darker potentials.

In 1986, I returned from my first wave of world travels and communal experiments to the “normal” world. I lived in a stairwell in Seattle for three days and then found marvelous digs along the Lake Washington coast in suburban Seattle where I eventually began writing my first book, Nostradamus and the Millennium, which came out in 1987. By early 1988 I flew a few more laps around the world collecting prophecies and experiencing spiritual communities in Italy, India, South East Asia and Australia then returned to Seattle in 1990. There I began a nine-year book writing marathon with the Millennium as the finish line.

The 1990s were the most sedentary decade of my life. I rarely was able to leave the confines of my modest one-bedroom flat–so intense was the outflow of books and the desire to share my experiences. It seemed as if I spent the last decade staring at the magic mirror of my Macintosh color monitor. Locked away like a termite queen in her chamber producing offspring, I gave birth to Millennium Book of Prophecy (1994), Nostradamus: The New Revelations (1994), the 1,000-page tome Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies (1997), The Last Pope (1998), 1000 for 2000 Predictions for the Millennium (1999), Messiahs: Visions and Prophecies for the Second Coming (1999), and right this moment I’m pasting together a little pocket book on Nostradamus for those of you who only have time to read 63 pages rather than 1,000 pages of Nostradamus.

I wasn’t always a literary shut-in. I did sneak out of my termite chamber to have a life whenever possible and as the decade moved along and the books started crowding the bookstore shelves I began to get a greater number of those do-I-know-you? stares. My owl-like and bearded mug, beret-covered head, and dandruff-dusted shoulders have found their way on over 40 American, European, and cable television shows to date. Some of you may have seen my talking head and beard on shows such as NBC’s “Ancient Prophecies Part I-IV,” “Encounters” (Fox), “Sightings” (Fox/Sci Fi Channel), “Lifestyles” (Chicago), “A&E’s Biography of Nostradamus”, “Ancient Mysteries with Leonard Nimoy” (A&E), “The Unexplained” (A&E), “Prophecies” (The Learning Channel), ABC’s “The View," "Unsolved Mysteries (CBS)," and Fox Channel’s “Prophecies of the Millennium.”

For nine years now some 30 to 50 million people have crowded onto my phone line for a listen. What I mean to say is that most of my 500 radio show interviews on three continents in the 1990s were held on the phone. It is a giddy feeling to pick up your receiver, converse with someone like Art Bell and know that 15,000,000 people are listening in.

I wish you all could see the view out my apartment window. While I’m on the phoner interviews I usually can look out my window at the Seattle downtown skyline and the Space Needle, the sun or moonlit sparkling waters of Puget Sound, and the enjoy the snow capped Olympic mountains sitting in their pleated fir tree foothill skirts. (Well, to be truthful, most of the time you can’t see that far, thanks to the famous Seattle rain. Usually I’m staring at a sheet of drizzle and watching Heaven’s drool trickle down my window in twisting Alanis-Morrisette tresses of H2O. But when I can see the view, it is Grrrreat!). Anyway, I’ve had the pleasure of hob-radio-knobbing with a few dissonant spikes but mostly a lot of wonderful and witty radio hosts from England, Ireland, New Zealand, OZ-stralia, Canada, America and Dreamland, coast-to-coast.

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I’m often asked if the world is going to end soon and my answer is an emphatic NO. There is life after New Years Eve, 1999! I reckon, if Nostradamus is correct, we have up to 1,800 more years of treats, tragedies and transcendental meditations to enjoy before that lucky ole’ Sun has nothin’ to do but supernova all day in the year AD 3797.

So, with that in mind, after the millennium hysteria and Y2K conniptions have passed–and I’ve gone through my reserves of canned food, water, and stockpile of gin and brandy–I expect I’ll have more time to African dance and romance. In the new millennium I plan to travel again and who knows, you might get up-to-the-week reports on my website of what strange new religious movement or meditation I’m trying to better wash my brain. (I’m all for brainwashing, especially after my meeting with the Indian mystic, Osho, when he gazed lovingly yet helplessly at me and said, “One must drop the mind, and your mind is so full of junk!”)

There will still be books to write. I have enough books jostling around in the mosh pit of a mind for five lifetimes. I hope the “uh-oh” decade of the “00s” will see me return to the fiction market and write on the subject of new religious movements. Certainly there will be more books on prophecy, because there’s a whole new millennium of ancient future history to record after the year 2000.

I guess it’s time to wrap this thing up. Here are some odd odds and ends of bio. data mixed in with some tawdry gossip about yours truly:

Affiliations: I am a member of World Future Society, Zero Population Growth, and WACSAC (the pugilistic punching bag of an acronym for the World Academy of Creative Science, Arts, and Consciousness.)

Favorite Pursuits: women, dancing, hiking, women, jogging, humor (you should see me jogging!), love play, meditation, women, painting, sex, (not in that order of course) and always with women friends whenever possible.

Favorite Music: classical; especially late German romantics like Nirvana, Whole (just kidding). I’m game for any kind of music if it has intelligence and innovation. I can rock to Alan Hovannes, Jim Morrison or Alanis Morrisette (I have a crush on the latter but don’t tell anybody.) Most of the time I gain inspiration while writing to classical music. Each book sees me usually focus on a certain composer or music genre. The fixations can be quite varied. I listened to ABBA while writing my first book Nostradamus and the Millennium (Lord knows why!). Try to picture writing about Nostradamus and Armageddon to “The Dancing Queen.” For a more recent book like Messiahs it came out of my typing fingertips to the background music of Mahler’s 2nd, 6th, and 8th symphonies.

I also listen to Anton Bruckner, Richard Strauss and Prokofiev. Wagner remains the constant though. His music helped me reconnect with being an orgiast. On the subject of sonic orgasms, at the moment I’m falling in love with Shostakovich’s 7th symphony. I’m afraid the little pocket book on Nostradamus I mentioned earlier will have to dance out of my mind to the syncopated snare drum march and staccato string parts of the “Leningrad Symphony”: rat-a-rat-a-tat, tata-rat-a-rat-a-tat, rat-a-rat-a-tat, tata-rat-a-rat-a-tat, dumm, dumm, dee-dum-dum…

Eye Color: blue
Hearing Capacity: better if I’m listening to people.
Typing speed: 80 words a minute. (I’m rather proud of that because I was the worst typing student in my typewriting class in high school. The teacher took pity on me and gave me a passing grade even though I could only plunk 15 words a minute–8 words if you count the typos.)
Hair Color: dusky brown. I have nine gray hairs too, one for each book.
Height: five foot eleven inches
Exercise Habits: running 60 minutes every other day–about 6 miles. Sometimes I train for running 7 miles every other day when I’m feeling frisky. Seattle is a great place to bike ride. I know a real “Rhodes” scholar–Vikki Rhoades. I regularly bike ride on weekends with her and her lifetime squeeze, Paul Cullen. We peddle in the wine country surrounding Seattle. Sometimes we cycle up to 35 miles. It’s a great way to pump the wine and cheese out your pores and keep your girlish figure. The steep slopes of the Cascades and Mt Rainier are also great love-and-butt-handle stair masters.
Weight: fluctuating
Sex: yes!
Shoe Size: 12.5, Triple-E width;
Foot Condition: flat
Hat Size: eight and above. Some people say I have a big head.
Vision: above normal but tons of flecks swimming in there.
Back Tickling and Head Rubs: often!
Genetic Makup: French Huguenot (if you spell your name H-o-g-u-e you may be a distant French relative about 400 years removed). I’m also Dutch, Irish, English, Viking, German, Russian/Ukranian Jew, and perhaps a little smattering of Canadian Indian, but if I have a nose bleed I’m out of the tribe. In other words, I’m mostly a mutt from Europe.
Favorite Wine: French reds, zinfandels, cabernets, lembergers–not Ripple.
Favorite Reclining Position: in a hot bath.
Favorite Color: rainbow
Favorite Meditations: Dynamic, Gourishankar, Sufi Whirling, Vipassana and Tantra.
Political Affiliation: Meritocrat
Spiritual Affiliation: Just religious, thank you...

Okay, I’ve run out of things to list so I’ll be saying bye bye for now...

PS–I’d like to hear from you. E-mail your questions, jokes, cards and letters, or observations about the future and please send your comments about my work–say hello. Okeeday?. I’m cramming as much meditation, life, and writing into this mortal container as I can so it might take me some time to sift through the tome of thousands of e-mails per week, but I intend to respond to all of you before we finish the new millennium.

Please e-mail me at talktome@hogueprophecy.com

Until then, have your best future today,

Love and giggles,

John Hogue

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