Prophecy in the news: Thoughts on belief, consciousness and human destiny

History is never more compelling than when a prophecy more than two millennia old hits the news, its ancient words fleshed out in the day’s events.

Foreknowledge of human destiny in “end times” now echoes from all over the world – from Israel’s Dead Sea Scrolls; the Hopi Indians’ nine signs of end times, with eight signs already visible in North America; Peru’s Mayan astronomer priests’ millennial calendar ending in 2012, “the end of the world as we know it," the lamas of Tibet preparing for the “Coming One," the Buddha Maitreya; and finally, St. John the Apostle’s fiery vision of Jesus’ Second Coming in the same Greece now hosting thousands of war refugees from the tinderbox of Syria.

All this makes earth science writer Gregg Braden’s “The Isaiah Effect: Decoding the Lost Science of Prayer & Prophecy” (2000) urgent rereading. This book, based on his travels among living members of sacred cultures, highlights a powerful belief they all share: that the outcome of these end times is in human hands.

Back in the summer of 1969 Braden took the first steps to this realization. That was a banner year, with the Apollo moon landing followed by Woodstock—where the Make Love, Not War generation exorcised the Vietnam War with music that electrified youth all over the world.

Braden recalls the impact: “In the span of just a few weeks, we showed ourselves that we have the technology to visit other worlds and the wisdom to live peacefully on this one without the need for law enforcement or a higher authority forcing us...Both challenged the world’s ideas and beliefs, showing me what was possible.”

Five decades later, this is how the world strikes him: “In the light of the kind and number of crises we face in our lives today, it maybe that our ability to recognize, or create, critical turning points will become the key to transforming our lives.”

Indeed. If the children born in the Third Millennium are called “millennials,” our generation could well be called “apocalyptics." “Apocalypse” describes our times to a T; not in its modern sense of “cataclysm,” but in its original meaning – "revealing the hidden."

Ask yourself: how many hidden secrets vital to human survival are being revealed now while our planet’s waters rise from melting polar ice in global warming? Meanwhile, we watch a possible outbreak of a third world war in the Middle East on top of another looming global economic crisis.

Apocalyptics feel a circle closing beween two eras separated by two thousand years and more – on one hand the world’s prophetic traditions that woke us to a living global story; on the other, new visions in our Quantum/Space Age vaulting through cyberspace.

This is the moment to look back on the radical discoveries that came at us with breakneck speed in the ‘60s, with hardly time to recover from the last jolt before the next shock. Astrophysics, for one, had begun seeing the atom – the building block of matter – in a totally new way.

Realizing that not only are we and our planet made of the same protons, neutrons, and sub-atomic particles as the stars and planets, scientists now see that observing atoms and their sub-particles disrupts the original state of matter itself.

To their surprise, they discovered that peering at the atom through their telescopes mysteriously causes its collapse from a wave to a barely visible particle. “Consciousness is actually creating reality!” a cosmic anthropology professor exclaimed.

In the first two decades of the second millennium Einstein had perceived that everything was in a state of pure energy before matter ever came to be. Braden recounts that by the 1940s, Konrad Zuse, the first computer designer, had a flash of insight on how Creation works: “Could the entire universe be a huge computer with a code that makes whatever is possible, possible? Are we living a virtual reality running on a computer made of quantum energy itself?”

Next, combining pure physics with cyber tech MIT mechanical engineering professor Seth Lloyd, who designed the first workable quantum computer, declared in 2006: “All interactions between particles in the universe convey not only energy but information – particles not only collide, they compute. The entire universe is computing its own dynamic evolution!”

Braden for his part recounts his encounter with a Hopi Indian in New Mexico as he tracked evolution backwards deep into the pre-Industrial Age. “I have come to listen to the voices of my ancestors in those caves," said the Hopi, pointing to hundreds of ancient dwellings in an 11-mile-long canyon with four storey-high buildings and round stone kivas buried in the ground with vast irrigation systems.

“Then suddenly those who built them were gone,” the Hopi continued. Braden learned that no written records were ever found, no sites of mass burials or cremations or weapons. They just vanished, leaving few clues to tell us who they were, except for the rock art on the canyon walls.

The Hopi continued: “A long time ago, our world was very different There were fewer people and we lived closer to the land. People knew the language of the rain, the crops, and the Great Creator. They even knew how to speak to the star and the sky people.

“They were aware that life is sacred and comes from the marriage between Mother Earth and Father Sky. There was balance; people were happy. Then something happened. No one really knows why, but people started to forget who they were, feeling separate from the earth and each other, even from the one who created them.

“Lost, they wandered through life without direction or connection, believing they had to fight to survive in this world and defend themselves against the same forces that gave them the life they had learned to trust and live with in harmony.

“Soon all their energy was used to protect themselves from the world around them, instead of making peace with the worldwithin them. They had forgotten who they were. But somewhere inside them was a memory...

“In their dreams they knew that they held the power to heal their bodies, bring rain and speak with their ancestors. They knew that somehow they could find their place in the natural world once again.

“They began to build things outside their bodies that reminded them of who they were inside.But the farther they wandered from their inner power, the more cluttered their outer lives became with the things that they believed would make them happy.”

“How does the story end?” Braden asked. The man whispered, “No one knows because the story isn’t finished. The people who got lost are our ancestors, and we are the ones writing the ending.” Gregg Braden elaborates on this in the video “The False Assumptions and the New Discoveries.”

Among the 2,000-year old prophecies coming to pass in our time, the most fascinating seems to be the legacy of the Essene mystics.

“Ascetics who had existed for thousands of generations and do not marry or possess money yet practice charity,” is how the naturalist Pliny, also a Roman army officer in ancient Judea, described them.

Essene records found centuries later were written on scrolls of papyrus from plants and leather from animals in three ancient languages: the Ge’ez of Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa, Aramaic and Hebrew spoken and written in the Middle East long before the birth of Christ. The oldest scrolls were the Book of Enoch dated back to 300 BCE before the Great Flood. Enoch, in fact, was Noah’s grandfather seven generations back.

In this Book, we discover that Essene beliefs were closely kin to the original beliefs of Jews and Christians. But while both traditions acknowledge the Book’s historical value and theological significane, neither one considered it “canonical," i.e. directly inspired by God.

Unlike them, however, the Tewahedo Orthodox Churches of Ethiopia and Eritrea believe to this day that God himself dictated this book to Enoch in his dreams, visions and actual visits to heaven. Old Testament stories like the fallen angels in both the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible are clear traces of Enoch’s influence.

Both books edited out Enoch’s version of this story’s beginning with these Fallen Angels called “Nephilim” coming to earth and mating with human women, thereby “introducing evil and impurity on earth.”

Despite sectarian differences, however, all these accounts of the origins of mankind continue to be linked by the story of a Messiah born to earth. The purpose of this birth -- to heal the breach of the divine plan by both fallen angels and men --climaxes in a shared prophecy of Christ’s Second Coming that we could be seeing coming to pass right now.

Lost for centuries, the mysterious Book of Enoch was found again by a French astronomer in the 17th century Ethiopia. The authenticity of this find was hotly debated, but other copies were found and translated to Greek, Danish, German, Danish and English.

Debate on its interpretation is still going on, but as we focus on Enoch’s relevance to end times, it’s vital to note that the scrolls were discovered right after World War II. Its location in the West Bank of Israel/Palestine and related scrolls in Egypt proved the Essene geographical spread, great antiquity, and who knows? perhaps also Divine Providence.

Significantly, the Nag Hammadi scrolls, now called the “Gnostic Gospels," offer a radically different view of Christianity as most of us know it, along with the nature of reality itself. Equally significant is that, when scrolls were discovered, nuclear science had just exloded the atom bomb and now was bubbling over with radical new thought on the nature of reality itself.

With Nobel Prize-winning physicists leading the charge, the scientists were quietly upending the prevailing worldview the way Galileo once did. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity set the stage in 1915 for his fellow physicist Max Planck to deliver a shocker three years later. “Matter as such does not exist. The universe is held together by a mind...an intelligence,” he solemnly declared in his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize in 1918. What Planck had done was announce the birth of the quantum theory already shaking the very foundations of western science.

Next came a third physicist, Niels Bohr, saying: “Atom-sized objects are disturbed by any attempt to observe them." Werner Heisenberg’s Second Principle of Thermodynamics followed with the famous words, “We alter what we observe.”

These scientific quantum leaps next pushing towards outer space were perfectly paralleled by our generation’s counter-pull into inner space. Born in atomic war, seeing adulthood under the threat of a far more decisive nuclear war, our generation’s quest became a “paradigm shift” from a warlike culture of death to a joyful culture of life.

This led right back to ancient cultures where reality began emerging in a new light. Songs, stories, prayers, poetry, prophecy and mind-altering drugs – in what we learned to call “technology of the sacred” – opened doorways to divinity in the same reality the sciences were exploring on the material plane.

Unlike anything we’d ever learned from the Bible, this technology stretched our sense of space and time. Now we understood what Einstein must have meant when he said space and time are the same reality. That was exactly what the ancient Maya and the Hindus called the ceaseless cycle of Creation and Destruction – and what an LSD trip felt like!

Accompanying our generation’s wisdom quest were great minds like Heinrich Zimmer in “Philosophies of India," Joseph Campbell in “Masks of God," Carl Gustav-Jung in “Memories, Dreams, Reflections," theosophist Levi in “The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus, the Christ," Helena Blavatsky in “Isis Unveiled,” a Yaqui shaman in “Teachings of Don Juan," William James in “Varieties of Religious Experience,” Evelyn Underhill in “Mysticism” and Alexandra David-Neel recounting her pioneering travels to Tibet. Like waterfalls all returning to their source, Mayan, Incan and Aztec wisdom followed.

All this inevitably led to seeing the Catholic Church most of us were born to as a power hierarchy of conformists steadily losing its grip on our hearts and minds. Relationship with God deepened to communion with a Source we felt most keenly not in churches but in Nature, with our fellow “children of the earth."

Discovering the Essenes was a peak experience where meditation and fasting became survival skills. Their far older faith, much like the Christian monks and Hindu yogis and yoginis, offered something valuable – their distinctive prayer.

Beyond words, Sufi prayer moves on the creative principle of Life itself, a gift all humans are born with, not the “original sin” Catholic teachers taught us. Neither begging nor supplicating, Essenes address the Divine directly, celebrating each moment in gratitude to a loving God, alert to the whisper of divine will.

Most striking about the Essenes is their mastery of inner power that Braden likens to quantum waves. Part of their sacred technology is focusing body, heart and mind into one single laser beam that makes Jesus’ words leap from the page: “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all things shall be added unto you.” “Faith can move mountains.” “What the Father can do you can do also.”

“The Isaiah Effect” lays out a map of this path worth the whole world’s study. Meanwhile here are three Essene insights on the nature of reality now closing a grand circle of Life ancient and new.

Insight One – Our outer world mirrors our inner world.

Insight Two – Humans awake to their connection to all that exists can impact on the outer world with their inner power.

Insight Three – Focused worldwide, human consciousness could determine the outcome of end times in a fulfillment of human destiny -- just as the Hopi wisdom-keeper said. — BM, GMA News