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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You keep telling of these terrible things to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lost Book of Nostradamus?

It is a bogus book. Nostradamus could not draw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Hogue

(16 April 2010)

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

Osho.

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

SARAH
In my household we made many changes. We use less water, we try to live sustainably. But, even so, no one is perfect. Seeing neighbors being horrible to this earth makes my skin crawl. I try not to dig out of their trash and organize in into recycling bins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

And yet…

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

John Hogue

(13 April 2010)