***

When we, and the controversy of Nostradamus, entered a new millennium, many interpreters and dilettantes of Nostradamus mistakenly believed his prophecies foretold the end of the world–a strangely popular but patently unqualified myth, since Nostradamus had dated the end of the world 1,797 years ahead in the year 3797. Nevertheless, a peaceful turning of New Year’s Day 2000 exposed Nostradamus in the minds of many believers and skeptics as a prophetic failure and charlatan. Then on 11 September 2001, the debate about this man and myth came back before global scrutiny. No sooner had the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed into billowing, apocalyptic clouds of debris, than Reuters News Agency broadcast across the planet a prophecy attributed to Nostradamus about “hollow mountains” falling in the “City of York.” The lines of the purported prophecy–much like what we know about the man Nostradamus–were a blend of myth and fact. Fake lines like “the city of York” drew people in, yet these were sewn together with stolen lines of two actual Nostradamus prophecies–the same prophecies that for decades many interpreters, including this author, believed forecast a future nuclear or terrorist attack on New York’s lower Manhattan financial district.

A prophetic hoax about an attack on the “City of York” rode on the back of these real quatrain (four-line) prophecies about what many believe is an attack on New York:

At forty-five degrees latitude, the sky will burn,
Fire approaches the great new city.
Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up,
When they want verification from the Normans [the French].

Garden of the world near the new city,
In the path of the hollow mountains:
It will be seized and plunged into a boiling cauldron,
Drinking by force the waters poisoned by sulfur.

(Quatrain 97, Century 6 and Quatrain 49, Century 10, The Prophecies of M. Michel de Nostradamus.)

When you have two prescient-sounding yet general provocations that include images like “fire approaching” a “new city” at “forty-five degrees latitude” in the “path” of “hollow mountains” near a “garden of the word,” the hackles can rise–especially if you apply present-day facts to conveniently join together the dots of a 450-year-old prophetic rant to see what you want to see. Does one brush it all off as a coincidence that the city of “new” York is near latitude 45 degrees, or that the first Boeing 757 hijacked by terrorists cut into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in “a huge, scattered flame” at a 45-degree angle? Is it just the law of chance fooling a prophetically sympathetic mind when the second hijacked airliner passed over New Jersey (also known as the “Garden” state) and swerved at high speed toward the South Tower of the “world” Trade center building exactly over the “Path” subway tunnel before slamming into the second man-made peak of “hollow mountains”? And when Nostradamus describes his vision of “hollow mountains” being “seized and plunged” into a “boiling cauldron,” are we conned yet again by a new generation of sycophants tagging events of their time on to cryptic ravings; or is it more than a coincidence that each tower as it fell looked as if it were seized by the hand of an invisible force and plunged into the boiling cauldron of its own debris cloud? Are the “Normans” some retroactive allusion to the people of Normandy, or is this, as Nostradamian scholars believe, a code name for the French, whose intelligence agents on 10 September were indeed frantically warning their opposites in Washington D.C. that a terrorist attack on America was imminent?

Do we have a 16th-century charlatan catching us in our projections when the multiple meanings of Renaissance French can satisfy what we want to see? The word Nostradamus uses for “cauldron” is cuue (spelled cuve in Modern French). It can mean a number of things beyond “cauldron” such as “tank” or “tub.” Is the skeptic right when he brushes off any application of this word to the fall of the twin towers? Is the skeptic right to suggest waggishly that we might as well say Nostradamus is predicting some future disaster in a jacuzzi; or, is it not a little disturbing to one’s flippant reason to discover that the World Trade Center was built on a huge, rectangular cement box of watertight floor and walls known as “the tub”?

Welcome to the debate.

***

John Hogue

(11 September 2009)

I begin the first installment answering the embittered readers so that we can move to the sweet heart healing.

To the reader who merely calls himself “editor” comes this comment:

“I saw your blog that mentioned Adi Da — you might want to research him further, as there is a side of him that supporters don’t want to discuss.  Former devotees have information and essays posted at www.adidaarchives.org.”

MY ANSWER:

Thanks Editor of Adidaarchives.org.

I have been 30 years now tracking the lives of modern mystics and have already compiled a mountain of information from pro and con camps about Adi Da and others. It is a good thing for Jesus and Buddha that their police reports have disappeared from history. Modern mystics haven’t that pleasure. That is not to say that what you have documented isn’t factual, but in the world of mystics, the factual can be misinterpreted. For instance, if today we reprise the acts of an ancient Zen master hitting his disciple over the head with a stick, or throwing him out a second floor window, or cutting off the upheld index finger of a seven-year old disciple, he would rapidly find himself in prison. However, in each case these unusual and seemingly cruel acts led to a disciple’s enlightenment.

Spiritual liberation from illusion might be worth broken bones from a second floor window drop, a concussion from a stick strike or the loss of an illusory finger or be worth any other mainstream perceived outrage. That’s not saying there are people posing as masters who are doing real and great harm to their disciples. However, all cases are not as clear-cut as clueless mainstream outsiders or disgruntled devotees assume.

The path to enlightenment is not for the feeble minded or weak of heart. It is most dangerous and presents the highest risks. Indeed if liberation is not pursued as a life and death necessity, it will not have the totality needed to succeed. Even then, one can fall. One can miss. One can be embraced by a false master as much as by a true one. The path of disciplehood is the ultimate gamble seeking ultimate gain.

There is a common yet mostly unnoticed thread of prejudice in the ego mind-set of those who call themselves “former” disciples or devotees of gurus. Every disciple comes with his or her emotional and mental expectations of what the master will and should do, should be. Mostly these are unconscious or semi-conscious expectations. A real master who is there to catalyze a disciple’s own individual liberation from such a fractionalized mental and emotional mind-set will inevitably destroy those expectations. Many “former” disciples become campaigners against a teacher because they harbor spiritual sour grapes. They couldn’t cram the master up their own preconceived expectations and now they’re taking revenge.

Conversely, there are those who remain constant in their devotion to a master harboring another kind of blindness. They hold onto a mindset that turns their master into a projection of a new and dead dogma, even while he’s still alive. They just believe whatever the master says as gospel rather than take the master’s provocation as an unspoken challenge to find out whether what the master says is one’s own direct experience.

There’s a fine line between conscious devotion and blind belief in a master. Thus, many of the devotees who don’t want to discuss negative reports about their master are just as blocked as those former disciples who won’t look at their unrequited expectations. One kind of disciple is a victim of dogmatic belief untested. The former disciple can be a victim of a sliced-off finger, a push out the window or a stick over his or her thick headed belief systems that failed to liberate, not because the master was mean, but because the so-called victim’s reactive-conditioned mind prevailed.

It is this mind-set, which I define in Third Antichrist, as the Antichrist Unconscious, that makes all of us victims of its reactive whims. The true masters out there are trying in every way, even when they are sometimes shocking us, to snap us out of the Antichrist Unconscious’s hypnotic suggestion.

The master-disciple relationship is a different world, following different ethics. I will endeavor to explain that world in future writings because I am an initiate with direct and ongoing experience of this unique love relationship since 1980. My study of prophecy is only a sideline to a life path that directly, intimately engages the new religious movements and spiritual revolutions of our times.

Thanks again for the link, “editor” of adidaarchives. I will examine it carefully and compare it with my own legal and police reports. Perhaps in the future I can help people who identify themselves as devotees or former devotees see something beyond these retarding identities. Even the word “devotion” cannot contain something far more mysterious and blissful than it tries to limit in label.  Perhaps I can present a world of ethics that is trans-moral rather than amoral or merely of mainstream morality, which in the world of enlightenment is not worth much, compared to the bliss and liberation possible living beyond reactive mindsets.

John Hogue
(09 December 2008)

A harrowing story of survival from a Friend

In my last blog, I wrote about seeking information on friends and acquaintances who survived, or didn’t survive the Mumbai terrorist attacks from last week. So far, it looks like none of them number among the slain or wounded.

I just got this report. It’s an account about an Osho devotee I‚Äö?Ñ?¥ve known since the mid-1980s and his harrowing experiences as a hostage (or better, refugee in the cross-fire) of the terrorists battling Indian paramilitaries in the Oberoi Hotel.

This story comes from the Edmonton Sun Newspaper:

***

Former Edmontonian Michael O’Byrne, one of the late Judge Michael O’Byrne and his wife Eileen’s 11 children (Eileen now lives in Victoria), is counting multiple blessings.

Many years ago, Michael left Edmonton to follow the late Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (also known as Osho). Today, with his brother D’Arcy, he runs the thriving Osho program and publishing house in India.

Michael had just left the restaurant of Mumbai’s Oberoi Hotel in India on Wednesday to return to his room when terrorists attacked the restaurant.

Almost everybody in the dining room was killed.

According to a family member’s report, Michael then heard the hotel fire alarm.

People started walking down from the 17th floor. The elevator was locked.

Michael, fresh off knee surgery, couldn’t take the stairs. He returned to his room.

The fire alarm was thought to be set off by the terrorists. They shot hotel guests as they appeared in the stairwell.

The terrorists ended up on Michael’s floor, stayed there for hours. Again, luck intervened. They did not burst into his room.

The hotel contacted O’Byrne before the phone went dead, advising him to stay in his room, stay in the safest place, the bathtub.

And so he waited, some 50 to 60 hours through smoke and drifting gunpowder residue until Indian special forces rescued him and other surviving guests.

“We are all so blessed and happy that Michael made it outside,” says his last remaining brother in Edmonton, lawyer and businessman Casey O’Byrne.

***

I will share more reports with you all as soon as they become available.

John Hogue
(07 December 2008)

Osho in Greece, 1986

Friends,
India is on our minds these days, what with Islamo-Fascist terrorist attacks on hotels, a train station, a hospital and a Jewish center in Mumbai. The attacks have prophetic significance. I will soon deliver a comprehensive report on India’s 9/11 terrorist event and where it takes us next.

In Predictions for 2008, I already indicated where “next” might be going nearly a year before it happened. The bloodshed in Mumbai taking place during the American Thanksgiving Holiday is the first step in a new global crisis that I predicted would appear in the year 2008. The terrorists aim to bring on a new Indo-Pakistani border standoff dragging Pakistan down into social, political breakdown and chaos.

A far more significant event took place on Thanksgiving Day holiday that the media, engrossed in the Mumbai terror has almost completely overlooked. American mystic Adi Da Samraj (aka Bubba Free John, or Da Free John) has died on this, America’s unique national-quasi-religious holiday. Thousands of his devotees from across the world are at this moment converging on the Fijian island of Naitamba to partake in a meditation vigil around the lifeless body of their master who had apparently suffered a massive heart attack on 27 November 2008.

Adi Da Samraj (1939-2008)

Many of them hold hope that Adi Da, who they believe is the greatest of yogic masters, will re-enter his lifeless body after three days. To anyone who has trekked on spiritual pilgrimages through India, as I have, you learn of stories of great masters suddenly falling dead and remaining without a pulse for three days before miraculously coming back to life. Sai Baba of Shirdi (1835-1918) is said to have accomplished this feat because of his Yogic powers. Perhaps Adi Da will do the same?

I am sorry to predict that this will not be the case for Adi Da. He is, as the Buddhists say, “gateh gateh, par gateh, pare gateh Bodhisvaha gateh.”

He’s gone, gone, completely gone from his corporeal form.

I have mentioned and quoted Adi Da in Millennium Book of Prophecy and Messiahs: the Visions and Prophecies of the Second Coming. Adi Da shared a vision with G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, J. Krishnamuri and Osho, of the current birth pangs set to release out of the travails of the 21th century a balanced and harmonious New Humanity. The year 2008 marks the first contractions of the century-long travail.

The passing of Adi Da Samraj brings to mind my first-hand experience of the great let-go (Mahasamadhi) of another spiritual master nearly 19 years ago.

I inserted the following account of my experience of Osho’s passing in a commentary for Century 4 Quatrain 31 of Nostradamus’ book “Les Propheties” written back in the 1550s. I wish to present it again here as an offering of condolence and love to all those thousands of Adi Da devotees who are undergoing this most significant moment in a master-disciple relationship: the physical connection becoming an immortal connection.

***

La Lune au plain de nuict sur le haut mont,
Le nouueau sophe d’vn seul cerueau l’a veu:
Par ses disciples estre immortel semond,
Yeux au midy, en seins mains, corps au feu.

The Moon in the middle of the night over the high mountain,
The young sage alone with his mind has seen it.
His disciples invite him to become immortal
His eyes at the middle, his hands (folded) on his breast, his body in the fire.

We see Nostradamus describing the moment of awakening experienced by a young man who is alone at midnight. He has seen it — the truth of being — which transcends the dialectics of words and is beyond any duality.

The prophecy jumps into the future: the sage is no longer alone. He has many disciples who, by opening their hearts and minds, imbibe his existential truths. His body may die, but his essence, his immortality, lives on in his disciples. In some secret manner the sage will dissolve himself into them.

Two possible clues are hiding in the double pun of midy: either it means the sage faces south, in his temple or in meetings with disciples, or the word can mean “meridian” or “middle.” One, therefore, can picture the young sage as a mystic from the East whose eyes move up toward the middle of his brow — his third eye — when he rises into a mystical ecstasy.

Line 4 could contain more complex layers of meaning, some that your author may have witnessed first hand when he was invited to participate in the funeral celebration and ritual cremation of one of this century’s most controversial mystics, Osho (1931-1990).

On the evening of 19 January 1990, the body of Osho was brought into the public meeting hall at the Osho Commune International [situated in Pune, 110 miles east of Mumbai]. Several thousand white-robed followers danced and celebrated in front of the flower-festooned bamboo bier, in the most unusual and happiest funeral I have ever experienced. There were certainly a lot of tears but even in the midst of grief, most of the faces in that hall were filled with a glow of gratitude and love for a man who for them was the most remarkable person they had ever known and loved.

After ten minutes the body was carried off on its final journey to the burning ghats, the simple funerary crematoriums one finds along Indian rivers. Chance would have it that I walked alongside his body all the way to the ghats. I could see him perfectly. Osho didn’t look dead at all. Now I understand the stories about Zen disciples who resisted burning their master’s body until they were sure he was really dead and not just playing a prank. Osho was just lying there. Very transparent, delicate, as if he were glowing from the inside. He was the most alive corpse I had ever seen. I couldn’t believe he was actually dead until one of the pall bearers got a little carried away by the energy of the celebration and his dancing gait made Osho’s head and neck bob about like rubber.

There were between 2,000 to 5,000 thousand people in white [robes] at the ghats. I sat in the first row. I saw the man’s peaceful face for the last time, bathed in the light of electric torches as the final logs and flowers were lowered on to the funeral pyre, to the sounds of musical instruments and thousands of voices singing a stirring devotional song. The verses warmed the cold and humid Indian night air with the words, “Step into the holy fire, walk into the holy flame, oh! Halleluiah! Halleluiah!!” Soon a great flame leapt up from the funeral pyre. Osho’s family was to my right. They were crying like children. His younger brother Amit, in particular, was sobbing with such innocence and beauty that I was carried into his sobs. But even as the tears came I sensed a presence, a heresy, growing inside me. “What are you crying for?” said the heresy (as if it could speak). I felt I was saying goodbye to someone who hadn’t left — couldn’t leave me. For the rest of the night this heresy grew, and along with thousands of others I could not contain my delight.

Let us look again at the quatrain.

Osho claims that his enlightenment took place in a park in Jabalpur, India, when he was alone, sitting under a malshree tree at midnight (in the middle of the night) on 21 March 1953. At the time had just turned 21 years old (the young sage). He was born with five planets in the sign of Capricorn, which in occult astrology is symbolized by a high mountain cutting into the limitless sky. Osho describes enlightenment as a state of “no-mind,” in which one lives in an ultimate state of freedom he also calls blissful aloneness. In the East the mind and the ego are to be witnessed as false phenomenon outside of consciousness until one recognizes the truth of one’s authentic being — which he often referred to as “It.” (The young sage alone with his mind has seen it).

Osho often told his disciples that upon his death “I will dissolve into my people” in what he called the Buddhafield, the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness. This is a collective experience of enlightenment that all equally unique individuals can draw from. The days when people give up their responsibility to saviors are drawing to a close. Rather than the arrival of a Messiah in the 21st century, Osho predicted more of a collective awakening, or impersonal messianic experience. In other words, the Messiah is not coming — he is already hiding under our false egos and programmed behavior. The Messiah is within. Osho once said to Kurt Braun, the author of Rajneeshpuram: the Unwanted Society, that his people would become his autobiography (his disciples will invite him to become immortal).

Dr. Amrito, Osho’s personal physician, once told me that his patient experienced a strange physical phenomenon caused by his enlightenment — he felt constantly on fire inside. Osho was noted for keeping his room temperature at around 40 degrees to keep cool (his body in the fire). I can attest to the fact that he gave his daily discourses facing south in the commune’s meeting hall. He regularly could be seen with his eyes fixed in the middle of his brow in ecstasy. And his body on the funeral bier lay with its hands folded in the fire of the cremation pit.

Does this quatrain refer to the life and death of Osho? The one who knows [Nostradamus] lies buried in the wall of a Salonaise Church.

Quatrain Indexing Date: “Q31″ = 1931. Osho was born on December 11, 1931.

(Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, pp. 323-325)

***

Stay tuned for more commentary about the Indian’s 9/11. Also tune into History Channel this Sunday evening (11/30/08) to see my appearance in the documentary: The Next Nostradamus.

John Hogue
(28 November 2008)

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