This is the best piece of yours I've read yet, Thom, and there are a lot of great ones to choose from. This is really the big issue of our time. Reading the comments below, I saw that some people chose to argue the validity of Descartes as founder of the scientific method. Most of the Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason was the h…
This is the best piece of yours I've read yet, Thom, and there are a lot of great ones to choose from. This is really the big issue of our time. Reading the comments below, I saw that some people chose to argue the validity of Descartes as founder of the scientific method. Most of the Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason was the human superpower by which the Mind of God could be fathomed, and the scientific method is the product of many of these people's efforts to become like God. Descartes's simple axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)" can be seen as battle cry of rationalism itself, more than the foundation of the scientific method per se. It was certainly among the most revolutionary statements of history.
There is much I could say about what Thom says here. I will read his book that several of you mentioned: "The Prophet's Way." At the moment, I'm wondering if it's autobiographical, because he often speaks with the clarity and authority of a prophet.
Since others have opened the door to it, I'm going to use a Biblical reference to make a point. The Pharisees asked Jesus to give them a sign. He responded, "No sign will be given to this faithless generation except the sign of Jonah." Usually this is taken to refer to Jonah's three days in the belly of the fish as an allusion to Christ's three days in the tomb before resurrection.
However, there's more to the story. The reason Jonah was cast overboard from the ship during the storm and thus exposed to the creature in the first place was that God had commanded him to go and preach destruction and judgment to the Ninevens for their sins, but he refused. The fish was his punishment. When he repented and was spared after three days, he went on to carry out his mission, and gave the warning to the people of Nineveh. Then he went up on a hillside, built a tent, and waited to watch the destruction. Nothing happened. He cried out to God in protest, after having gone through so much to deliver the message. The Lord answers, "Why should I destroy a city with so many righteous people?" (Like other commenters, I'm paraphrasing from memory). You see, upon hearing the words of judgment, the Ninevens had repented in ashes and sack cloth in the streets of the city, crying out for forgiveness and mercy. This was a reversal of the destructive course they had been on, and so they were forgiven and spared.
In giving the Sign of Jonah, I believe Jesus was saying, "If you turn away from evil and stop obstructing me and live according to God's will, the annihilation that's about to befall you will be diverted, and you will be able to establish the Kingdom of Heaven that you've been praying and suffering for. However, because you don't know the time of your visitation, there will not be one stone left upon another within you." And indeed, within 70 years of his crucifixion, Jerusalem was sacked, and the Israelites were dispersed throughout the world to endure great persecution down into our times.
All of that is to say, the times are the same today, only much more intense. The warnings are being given, and they are not being spoken of among elite initiates behind closed doors in the inner sanctum of some temple, but every night, in front of everyone, in plain language, on the evening news. So where are our ashes and sack cloth? Where are the elders of the people leading us to repentance and to change our ways? Who is ever going to be able to plead ignorance?
In the lyrics Tim Rice wrote for "Jesus Christ, Superstar," Judas chides Jesus, saying, "... Why'd you pick such a backward time, in such a strange land? If you'd have come today, you could have moved the whole nation. Back in 4 BC they had no mass communication!" And today we do have global mass communication, and as such the need for individual prophets has greatly diminished. EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE is hearing the message 24 hours out of every day. No one with access to television, the internet, or even just a radio, can claim ignorance.
One perversion, especially among so-called "Christian Nationalists," is to limit God's Will to certain moral proscriptions in the Old Testament or pulled from the asses of medieval popes and councils. They scream that God will condemn us because we suffer gays and lesbians to live, or let women have autonomy over their bodies. We allow the mixing of the races and cultures, but we don't want to allow religious bigots (they consider themselves "the righteous") to dictate the lives of the rest of us.
Rigid "Christian" Nationalists actually defy one of the greatest principles of Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition by stubbornly standing against repentance and contrition. When someone tries to recognize the atrocities that this nation committed against Native Americans and people kidnapped and dragged here in chains from Africa, instead of acknowledging the sins and seeking in grief and humility to make amends, the "Christians" of today become boastful, arrogant and self-righteous. They call those who cry out against social injustice and the destruction of our planet and ecosystem through corporate greed, communists and Marxists, or use their favorite catch-all phrase, "Woke." And of course, "Woke" means you support drinking babies' blood and call for naked, drunken orgies in "The hallowed halls of our great institutions."
But there are no ashes and sack cloth. You'd think that by now, in this capitalist nightmare we live in, at least one entrepreneur would have picked up on a trend and started trying to corner the ash-and-sackcloth market, or tried to copyright or patent it or something, but so far, it hasn't popped up in my Facebook ad feed.
I maintain that there are dimensions, what Jesus called "principalities and powers," that exist beyond this three-dimensional world of illusion and ceaseless impermanence, and there are already things in place in those realms that we can't perceive as yet where we are, here in this densest and most illusory realm of existence. And these things will be manifested.
So back to Jonah, and I'll finish. I have a sense that the only way this world can be set on a better track - salvation, if you will - is for the system we've built to collapse. That's what it has taken historically. The messages are given, but the people harden their hearts until there is no other recourse. We seem collectively incapable of hearing the voice of our own Higher Wisdom. That's what happened in the 1860s when our Union was being ripped apart. In 1929, we had a world-wide economic collapse, followed by the bloodiest war in history. In both cases, in the aftermath, we managed to cobble together a marginally better, more just world.
The earth and every single part of her infinitely complex being is alive and conscious, and in the same way the myriad systems in our bodies can work together to kick off disease, the thinking, aware and sentient Cosmos is fully capable of healing itself from the cancer that we have become. We are already undergoing increasingly severe purges or '"judgments" (to use the Biblical term), until we either find our ashes and sack cloth, or the Earth is cast back to pre-industrial levels and we are compelled to live in peace, respect and harmony with our Father/Mother God, with the forces of Nature in which we have our entire existence and on which we are completely dependent, and with the rest of life, with which we are equal (not above) and One..
This is the best piece of yours I've read yet, Thom, and there are a lot of great ones to choose from. This is really the big issue of our time. Reading the comments below, I saw that some people chose to argue the validity of Descartes as founder of the scientific method. Most of the Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason was the human superpower by which the Mind of God could be fathomed, and the scientific method is the product of many of these people's efforts to become like God. Descartes's simple axiom, "Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)" can be seen as battle cry of rationalism itself, more than the foundation of the scientific method per se. It was certainly among the most revolutionary statements of history.
There is much I could say about what Thom says here. I will read his book that several of you mentioned: "The Prophet's Way." At the moment, I'm wondering if it's autobiographical, because he often speaks with the clarity and authority of a prophet.
Since others have opened the door to it, I'm going to use a Biblical reference to make a point. The Pharisees asked Jesus to give them a sign. He responded, "No sign will be given to this faithless generation except the sign of Jonah." Usually this is taken to refer to Jonah's three days in the belly of the fish as an allusion to Christ's three days in the tomb before resurrection.
However, there's more to the story. The reason Jonah was cast overboard from the ship during the storm and thus exposed to the creature in the first place was that God had commanded him to go and preach destruction and judgment to the Ninevens for their sins, but he refused. The fish was his punishment. When he repented and was spared after three days, he went on to carry out his mission, and gave the warning to the people of Nineveh. Then he went up on a hillside, built a tent, and waited to watch the destruction. Nothing happened. He cried out to God in protest, after having gone through so much to deliver the message. The Lord answers, "Why should I destroy a city with so many righteous people?" (Like other commenters, I'm paraphrasing from memory). You see, upon hearing the words of judgment, the Ninevens had repented in ashes and sack cloth in the streets of the city, crying out for forgiveness and mercy. This was a reversal of the destructive course they had been on, and so they were forgiven and spared.
In giving the Sign of Jonah, I believe Jesus was saying, "If you turn away from evil and stop obstructing me and live according to God's will, the annihilation that's about to befall you will be diverted, and you will be able to establish the Kingdom of Heaven that you've been praying and suffering for. However, because you don't know the time of your visitation, there will not be one stone left upon another within you." And indeed, within 70 years of his crucifixion, Jerusalem was sacked, and the Israelites were dispersed throughout the world to endure great persecution down into our times.
All of that is to say, the times are the same today, only much more intense. The warnings are being given, and they are not being spoken of among elite initiates behind closed doors in the inner sanctum of some temple, but every night, in front of everyone, in plain language, on the evening news. So where are our ashes and sack cloth? Where are the elders of the people leading us to repentance and to change our ways? Who is ever going to be able to plead ignorance?
In the lyrics Tim Rice wrote for "Jesus Christ, Superstar," Judas chides Jesus, saying, "... Why'd you pick such a backward time, in such a strange land? If you'd have come today, you could have moved the whole nation. Back in 4 BC they had no mass communication!" And today we do have global mass communication, and as such the need for individual prophets has greatly diminished. EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE is hearing the message 24 hours out of every day. No one with access to television, the internet, or even just a radio, can claim ignorance.
One perversion, especially among so-called "Christian Nationalists," is to limit God's Will to certain moral proscriptions in the Old Testament or pulled from the asses of medieval popes and councils. They scream that God will condemn us because we suffer gays and lesbians to live, or let women have autonomy over their bodies. We allow the mixing of the races and cultures, but we don't want to allow religious bigots (they consider themselves "the righteous") to dictate the lives of the rest of us.
Rigid "Christian" Nationalists actually defy one of the greatest principles of Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition by stubbornly standing against repentance and contrition. When someone tries to recognize the atrocities that this nation committed against Native Americans and people kidnapped and dragged here in chains from Africa, instead of acknowledging the sins and seeking in grief and humility to make amends, the "Christians" of today become boastful, arrogant and self-righteous. They call those who cry out against social injustice and the destruction of our planet and ecosystem through corporate greed, communists and Marxists, or use their favorite catch-all phrase, "Woke." And of course, "Woke" means you support drinking babies' blood and call for naked, drunken orgies in "The hallowed halls of our great institutions."
But there are no ashes and sack cloth. You'd think that by now, in this capitalist nightmare we live in, at least one entrepreneur would have picked up on a trend and started trying to corner the ash-and-sackcloth market, or tried to copyright or patent it or something, but so far, it hasn't popped up in my Facebook ad feed.
I maintain that there are dimensions, what Jesus called "principalities and powers," that exist beyond this three-dimensional world of illusion and ceaseless impermanence, and there are already things in place in those realms that we can't perceive as yet where we are, here in this densest and most illusory realm of existence. And these things will be manifested.
So back to Jonah, and I'll finish. I have a sense that the only way this world can be set on a better track - salvation, if you will - is for the system we've built to collapse. That's what it has taken historically. The messages are given, but the people harden their hearts until there is no other recourse. We seem collectively incapable of hearing the voice of our own Higher Wisdom. That's what happened in the 1860s when our Union was being ripped apart. In 1929, we had a world-wide economic collapse, followed by the bloodiest war in history. In both cases, in the aftermath, we managed to cobble together a marginally better, more just world.
The earth and every single part of her infinitely complex being is alive and conscious, and in the same way the myriad systems in our bodies can work together to kick off disease, the thinking, aware and sentient Cosmos is fully capable of healing itself from the cancer that we have become. We are already undergoing increasingly severe purges or '"judgments" (to use the Biblical term), until we either find our ashes and sack cloth, or the Earth is cast back to pre-industrial levels and we are compelled to live in peace, respect and harmony with our Father/Mother God, with the forces of Nature in which we have our entire existence and on which we are completely dependent, and with the rest of life, with which we are equal (not above) and One..