Biblical Scholar

Consciousness, God and Apocalypse

Two comments from John in a dialogue:

Around the 2012 time frame there are kind of two main possible worlds of the many worlds that await us on earth and even Revelations in the Bible is fairly accurate about those two possibilities. There's either a rapture-like event where the planet gets access to conformal like degrees of freedom which can cause some confusion cause you can't tell left from right and there's variable physicality but it overall is supposed to offer more control over the environment and be easier on the soul. The other possibility is the everyone back in caves with a reddish cosmic disaster sky to essentilly start over again for another 300,000 year cycle.

God is and is not distinct from creation. God is a prerequisite of creation and creation is a prerequisite of God's self-knowledge. Theologians have speculated on the possibility of something existing outside God. German mystic Jacob Boehme speaks of the ungrund, a sort of primal field of all potentialities which is the source of creation. This ungrund is not however the same as God. In more modern terms, we could say the ungrund is the zero point field and God is the consciousness which mediates between this and the emergence of all which is, energy as well as matter. Nicolai Berdayev proposes that the ungrund is in fact the primordial freedom, which is then brought to form by creation. Thus freedom is in a sense more fundamental than God.

No matter how civil the gloss, there are major problems with all these prophecies of apocalypse and theories about God in the universe.

Prophecies of a final end of days remain very real in evolving world culture and the ongoing clash of world cultures, to the detriment of our future survival and that of the living biosphere. The idea of apocalypse as 'unveiling' has permeated diverse cultures, because our own cultural falling out from nature has been an ongoing process of future shock in which we have become all too aware amid war and the rumour of war that a great shaking out is occurring in which the covers are relentlessly being thrown off reality in a tumult heading for a triage of all living beings. This is as real for the Aztecs and it was for the Zoroastrians who invented the final cleansing. It culminates in a genuine explosion of knowledge of the physical universe in the scientific revolution but is still accompanied by visions of final victory of religion seen through a glass darkly in the clash of the cultures.

Nevertheless it is a male fantasy of linear history, leading inevitably to a high-noon, in which the forces of light and darkness will be set in final opposition, instead of the complementarity that begets the complex conscious condition over evolutionary time.

The actual reality is that human culture has become patriachally dominant through the formation of male coalitions we call armies, amid urbanization, and that the male idea of a history of dominance has led to the sequences of conflict, famine, resurgence and delusions of final victory of our standard-bearer we call God, in a process which has, and is, seriously destabilizing our own future viability.

This kind of linear process converging on the 'end of days' is not the way the universe comes to generate life and consciousness, which is far from linear and steeped in complementarity between chaos and order, amid many cycles of astronomical upheaval, emergence of primeaval life, birth and death amid tooth and claw among predator, prey and parasite and host, and only indirectly, almost as an afterthought, comes upon the conscious condition and the emergence of love, altruism, morality and ethics as win-win evolutionary strategies in the prisoners' dilemma game life is.

One could take a leaf out of the Tao and the Tantric origin here, in which sexual fusion is the foundation of existence, and that all forms of interaction are a fragmented form of the act of love-making, but even this has led to all kinds of God delusions on both the male and female side, as soon as the parties have retreated far enough from coitus, to enter into the scrap of relationship dysphoria, amid value judgments about the illusory nature of the physical world, as the female's degenerate and blood-thirsty lower part in the cosmic embrace.


Just as humans use the construction of machines as their prime, if very clunky idea of cosmogenesis, in the form of a 'creator God' tinkering with some Pinocchio androids to see if they will distinguish good and evil, so more sophisticated attempts to move one step higher use the organismic analogy of a living being acting in history, generally replete with emotions, of which jealousy is a prime mover and retributor of 'divine justice'.

Both the machine and personality analogies have no meaning in the wider cosmological context. There is no evidence whatever that any of the process we see in cosmogenesis, from the big bang, through galaxy formation to evolution of living organisms, or in the embryogenic process that leads to ourselves among living organisms, nor the structure and function of the human brain, ever has, or could have been, externally created by a third-party agent, rather than develop through a series of self-interactions. Neither is personality, as such, an adequate generator of complexity, but rather, like the created machine, is a product, rather than a cause, of cosmogenesis.

The entire myth arises simply because we, as agents, are having a significantly dire impact on the planet, and tend to project on to the cosmos our own mistakes in amplified form, accompanied by a wistful child-like feeling of needing to attribute the consequences of our own partially destructive activities, on to a loving, but jealous, 'father figure', who takes ultimate responsibility for our folly, while chiding us, or threatening us with hell fires of damnation, if we don't mend our ways, and give our sole allegiance to Him.

While John's ideas about God are a good attempt to rationalize these ancient delusions into a more culturally acceptable entity, they still suffer from patriarchal nemesis. Firstly, while for each of us living in our own personal condition, subjective consciousness is undeniable and constitutes 100% of our experience of reality, God is an undecidable proposition inserted into the cosmic scheme without due or just cause to provide a creation myth based essentially on manufacture.

There is no evidence whatever that the cosmos needs and inside or outside third party agent for the cosmic process to flower to the point of conscious observers or beyond into the future. The idea of creation is the gloss humans try to put on the cosmic process by analogy with tool-making. All the evidence form the physical universe is that open complex systems are self-generating or interactively generating, not created. This is abundantly clear for living organisms, despite their structurally-stable genetic foundation, which then becomes the basis for a selective process leading to complexification and consciousness. At this point, it is we who are conscious participants in the future of reality and it is we who have to learn to come to take responsibility for our choices as the living manifestation of the redemptive process.

The key question that has to be asked here is not about God, or an inserted rationale for a creator in the process, but what the role of subjective consciousness is in organismic evolution, because no brain would so completely invest in such a process unless it had evolutionary advantage. It is this that is the crucible and arena for our conscious quest, and its fulfillment, not delusions of grandeur in the third person in the name of God.

The answer seems to be that free-will, quantum uncertainty and survival are linked in anticipating situations in the real world which in terms of classical computation would be intractable in 'encounter time' because they involve an exponential runaway of possibilities. In turn this seems to have accessed a deep interconnectivity across space-time, which we now call quantum entanglement.

This brings in a second question which is the role of consciousness in anticipating future states and modifying them through the action of free-will in a way which may come to collapse the wave function of the universe and hence all the hypothetical multi-verses of prophecy, premonition and fantasy, to create the unique path we call world history. It may be that evolution simply had to resolve the computationally intractable np-hard problem of the environment by resorting to chaotic holographic processing, and found that the laws of nature because of entanglement, then open up the space-time transactional route of anticipation of future states as well.

The only evidence we have for an agent like that John suggests in the universe is the biota, for it is the biota, and only the biota, that invoke this strange and fantastic contraption stuck onto the cosmic process some of us call God. It is only through the biota that we know consciousness is manifest, and despite its seemingly ephemeral nature, tossed in the annihilating forces of the universe, from black holes to big bangs, the biota still represent the 'inevitable' sigma of interactive fulfillment of the re-interaction of the founding forces of nature and the vehicle of sentient consciousness which gives us this existential dilemma in the first place.

Where some modern cosmic theorists do come a little closer to the mark is invoking ideas of internal symmetries and symmetry-breaking processes to explain the relationships between these forces which lead to such unbounded complexity. But again the idea that God invented the octonians or the exceptionally simple group E8 is a contradiction in terms, as silly as whether God invented the real numbers, when we know they are simply an axiomatic system possessing uniqueness properties of their own.

Now back to the God delusion and we find in John's very romantic account another fatal flaw in the form of the 'ungrund' or primal field, which forms another terrible condemnation of this idea as fatally patriachal as Marduk slaying Tiamat, in that the physical, and with it the feminine, are assigned to a passive slave role in merely being the female putty in God's male hands although possessing the ephemeral attribute of 'free-will' allowing a moment of 'splendour in the grass' before God intervenes to punish us for our sins of 'concupiscence'.

Whenever we find a description of reality in which the symmetry-broken complements descend into the dominance - let alone S&M role of creator and primal chaos, we need to stop and say to ourselves that the cosmic pregnancy has been aborted by a macho fantasy.

A prime example of this kind of male fantasy are the Mayan prophecies which were all based on mechanical cogs in a cosmology which at least in Aztec formulation resulted in a universe where thousands had to be sacrificed every season to keep the Sun on its course. We can't simply pick up pieces of this mechanistic cosmology and insert them into the new age of Western culture as 'prophecies' without completely fooling ourselves in our own superstitious state about the apocalyptic condition and without doing both them and ourselves a complete disservice turning genuine cultural traditions, which should be a warning to our own gullibility and risk-taking dominance into cyborg travesties of their original form, in a new age mold the originators would smart at.

Ultimately the buck stops here. Rather than speculating on prophecies, it is us who are the prophets of doom and salvation through taking personal responsibility for our actions on the biosphere and for the futures we invoke, both through the exercise of 'free-will' in collapsing the wave function of the universe into a beneficent or invidious 'destiny', and through our future-anticipating conscious awareness.

It is through us, and our emergent compassion, that the problem of existence will become a redemptive flowering of consciousness. Consciousness is participatory and it is only when we can cast God aside and stand up for the undeniable fact of our own participation in the flowering of conscious reality, that salvation will come to the world. This is where the messiah in each of us separates from our illusion of Abba and grows up in the conscious condition to become redeemers of the compassionate mortal coil as Bodhisattvas of the natural world.

John: I don't think I disagree with you anywhere. Consciousness and physicality are one down at the smallest level and there is no 3rd party God just the individual souls that all begin/end from where all is one and one is all.

In the first comment below, Egull claims we are nothing but the pawns of creator Gods, and that any thought of free will, democracy, or any form of biological autonomy, is in fundamental error - that we are, in spite of the lack of any real evidence - living in a deterministic, nightmare universe pre-determined for all time by creator Gods. This typifies the worst in religious thinking, which, in its essence, robs us of our autonomy, and any responsibility for our actions, by making us utterly helpless husks of the religious delusion that we are nothing but slaves to God. What is all the more alarming about this point of view is that, such beliefs are not as silly as they might sound, but are shared by the world's great religions, and a vast number of people on the planet.

This demonstrates how completely the messianic awakening comes into direct collision with religion as spiritual bondage in the 'binding together' religio asserts. The messiah takes complete personal responsibility, not just for one's own fate but for redeeming the fate of the entire cosmos. By contrast, the religious follower is a helpless slave of God. The fact that these two are in collision becomes all the clearer when one realizes that Yeshua's own life and death, far from being manifest as the Son of God, cast him into the oblivion of an untimely crucifixion for blasphemy and insurrection, like all the prophetic voices in the wilderness crying before him.

Those who would martyr themselves in Yeshua's shadow, in suicide bombings dedicated to being the slaves of al-Llah, need to comprehend that such a mission is a fallacy, because Yeshua's death had meaning only because he was taking, at least in his own mind, cosmic responsibility for his own actions, and the damage done; in pitting his own will against those of the religious forces of the day; not assigning himself to the vain hope of seeing God's face in paradise, surrounded by 32 black eyed virgins, no matter how many innocents are maimed, or killed along the way.

Postcards from the Edge of Apocalypse

Apocalypse is a cosmological nightmare which brings about the very situation it is trying to avoid, each moth flying into the candle flame of self destruction, while attempting to cast the others into the furnace, if they will not submit to the divine plan.

By reifying the conflict of final struggle, apocalypse pits the forces of dark and light in an irresolvable diabolical confrontation, from which mutually assured destruction is all but inevitable.

This is an ultimate tragedy, because it sacrifices the fertility of natural regeneration for a triage of the death of life.

It is easy enough to understand the religious impulse to apocalyptic awakening, because it inflates the religious experience into an explosive cosmic coup de grace, in which all the currents of history, right from the very source, come into a cataclysmic focus, the old order is cast away as a material husk, and ignorance is sublimated in the crucible of 'cleansing fire'.

But this is also the polluted toxic fire of hell and annihilation rather than the sweet aromas and rainbows in the valleys of reflowering paradise, when to be the fulfillment of the Fall it is the Tree of Life, hidden since the foundation of the world, that is its natural inheritor.

The failure of apocalypse to give an absolute assurance of reflowering Eden leads to a realization that this whole apocalyptic dilemma has been created by religion to put a flaming sword between us and paradise for the purposes of keeping us in religious bondage.

The founding Edenic myth and its dysphoric relationship between woman and man, man and god, and human destiny is thus tainted by the intentional perversion of human nature, and cannot be trusted.


The idea of coming into a tumultuous age of reckoning is nevertheless an honest account of our free-fall from a fruitful and generative gatherer-hunter existence in the wilderness, into urban societies, rising and falling, amid war and the rumors of war, precipitating tumult, and wholesale destruction of the living biosphere.

The concept of the unveiling, throwing the covers off reality, no longer through a glass darkly, is likewise a subterranean stream-of-consciousness account of our growing awareness and scientific knowledge of the subtlety and complexity of the natural universe, from the human genome to the paradoxical conscious existential condition.

Nevertheless the apocalypse is a tainted current on the collective consciousness, driven by delusory ideals of a God of creation, jealous by the dubious 'virtue' of his desire to be worshiped alone, driving all the currents of history towards a falling out between the virtual or actual slaves of God and the infidel who choose to think, act, or believe otherwise.


In this falling out, a triage results not only of every living thing but the oceans, stars and the sky, thrusting the delusion into a cosmic frame of narcissistic and self-absorbed dimensions, rather than a redemption of the living planet from the devastating impacts of human industry and exploitation on the planets future viability, both for us and our sibling species.

The utopian dimensions of apocalypse lead towards an ultimate end-game of bluff and counter-bluff using weapons of mass destruction as pawns in the game of brinkmanship, in the name of one religious path of the one true God, or another, aiming to trick the unbelievers into a state of subservience in the domination of the planet by the one God, each of these paths hunger for, with a gluttonous 'spiritual' greed and little care for the consequences, given God on our side.

Apocalypse could be the unveiling of the bride in matrimonial reunion, healing the falling out between woman and man and the rape of the planet by humankind, reflowering of the tree of life of the generations, but it won't be, unless we break out of the tender-trap constructed by religious delusion and learn to take personal responsibility for the fate of the natural world and for our own personal part in its redemption.

This is the destiny of the messiah, of the bodhisattva, and of the compassionate benefactress once they cast off the shackles of religious oppression for the untrammeled depths of personal experience.

Caught in the Calm before the Tumult

IT SEEMS TO ME LIKE THINGS ARE STARTING TO HEAT UP AGAIN GLOBALY...WHAT DO YOU THINK/FEEL????

I'm not sure if things are heating up globally except in terms of climate change brought on by an inability to conceive sustainable futures. The oil price is driving dangerously close to causing a world recession however and that is going to shift the balance of power away from the developed world unless we get on with finding viable alternative technologies fast enough to keep up with peak oil shock without social disruption and economic dissolution.

In terms of the clash of the cultures driven by the apocalyptic agendas of world religions and the fault line running through the Holy Land, I see this as a psychopathic error on all sides that frankly needs an exorcism in judgment of all the end of days domination scenarios, Christian, Jewish and Muslim as well as Zionist and Arab.

I don't want to leave the late planet Earth until I have held all three monotheistic apocalyptic religions to account for their sins of violence domination, sexual transgression and frank genocide, particularly in regard to their nuclear ambitions and end of days utopian dreams and have taught people to love their neighbours as themselves for their own survival and for the generations to come.

The actuality - the truth if you like - underlying the spiritual quest of existential reality - is so very different from all the ideas of God espoused by monotheistic religions, its like speaking another language, or living in a separate reality - as the last Mohican, or the noble savage of Brave New World, or an extraterrestrial. It is also vastly more subtle, deep and awe inspiring than simple materialist world views of quick-fix technological utopias can fathom.

However explaining this to religious leaders committed to submitting their faithful to God's will in the interests of a world domination locked in the fear and implicit violence of a 'merciful but vengeful creator', firmly believing in virgins reborn every day for the pleasure of men in a heavenly paradise, let alone any other traditional view of the afterlife, is a very difficult mission.

It is even more difficult with religious figures whose power depends on it than with vested interests of the military industrial complex, whose hypocrisy is more transparent and whose agendas are more immediately practical. The lesson of communism was that a materialist philosophy can imprison the body but it can't imprison the soul. Religious utopias incarcerate body, mind and spirit, lock, stock and barrel, and throw away the key. This is why they are utterly dangerous and diabolical in essence, for all their pretensions to justice, morality and peace.

While Rome slowly burns, I'm hanging out at the antipodes watching and waiting and biding my time, making music, writing and producing, keeping the sexual covenant and nourishing the family life, and the life of the land, while working part time for a few semesters more to keep my academic hand in the financial pocket sufficiently to make ends meet.

However if a bolt of lightning strikes, and all hell breaks loose, I'll be there in the centre of the cyclone, just like the woman clothed with the rays of the sun, to perform my act of 'miraculous dread' for the unborn generations to come.

WE NEED TO DECIDE IN THE NEXT COUPLE OF MONTHS IF WE ARE GOING TO LIVE HERE OR MOVE TO PERU - WE ARE OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS

When I was drifting down the Ucayali I seriously thought of buying as much land in a remote biodiversity hot spot of the Amazonian jungle as I possibly could and maybe moving there, but I'm pretty sure foreign ownership of land isn't as easy in Peru as it has been for the last 15 years in God's own country.

I love the Edenic great forest but it's another type of conflict zone where human life is cheap and the ultimate issues are perhaps even harder to resolve because they are less iconic and more diffusely a product of the vagaries of human nature. I yearn to protect the lungs of the planet, but until all these things be done the mass extinction is likely to continue for a while yet.

The Messiah's Aphrodisiac and Prostate Protection

I am 69 and still have regular sex around twice a week. For men in mid-life, the aim of riding the great wave is to enhance sexual prowess during the times one is engaged in making love, by both increasing psycho-physical libido and one's erection, while diminishing the dangers to the prostate for the rest of the time by consumption of both anti-oxidant and phytoestrogenic anti-cancer food components.

Enhancement on Nights of Love

Deer Velvet 250 mg (trace androgens and growth hormones)
Natural androgen enhancer Tongkat Ali Extract 1:100 100 mg taken on a cycle e.g. one capsule the day before sex and two capsules 2 hours before sex followed by a day off.

Half to one hour before sex:
Avigra (sildenafil) 50 mg (improves erectile function in the penis)
PT-141 0.75 mg as a nasal spray (enhances brain sexual sensitivity)

Viagra and Cialis, although tadalafil and sildenafil were discovered independently and are chemically unrelated, both enhance the nitric oxide feedback process in the cavernosum of the penis, by blocking the breakdown of cGMP, relaxing and inflating the cavernosum in a way which makes it easier to maintain an erection. They show little negative tolerance with continued use, however they neither increase libido, nor result in an erection, unless one is sexually aroused, or unless the circumstances associated with their use lead to sexual anticipation. Viagra is suitable for an evening, lasting up to four hours, Cialis for a weekend, lasting up to 24. Cialis has fewer side effects, like visual disturbances and nasal congestion, and is active for such a prolonged period it invites repeated love making, which is invigorating to exuberant sexual power and pleasure.

PT-141 is a research polypeptide neurotransmitter which acts on the brain melanocortin receptors but does not enhance skin tanning. It is still classified as a research substance but is claimed to be the only true aphrodisiac because it acts on the hypothalamus to enhance the brains sexual arousal. I find it enhances the nuances of sexual desire, making the opposite sex more 'chemically' and physically enticing. PT-141 nasally applied can raise blood pressure, but Viagra tends to lower it so the side effects of the two tend to cancel while the sexual effect complement.

Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia) is a Asian tree from the magnolia family that increases free testosterone, reputedly by activating the enzyme CYP17 central in androgen synthesis, without causing the pituitary to down regulate testosterone production. It may also act by increasing Luteinizing hormone, which turns on testosterone production in Leydig cells in the testes.

In my experience, an essential on the side virility stimulant is Tantric masturbation to the point of near orgasm, as many Indian sages have recommended in love-making as a channelling of Kundalini energy, combined with frequent orgasmic sex with a partner (which they didn't recommend).

© Durex Survey

More recently melon researchers have been touting melon skins, which contain the amino acid citrulline, which like viagra has been found to relax blood vessels, although the amount required is in the kilos. Other natural substances used as aphrodisiacs are Spanish Fly from the blister beetle, whose cantharidin inflames the urinary tract, causing priapism. However the mean lethal dose is close to the aphrodisiac dose and kidney and other damage can result. In an interesting case, French legionnaires who had eaten frog legs, after they had unbeknown to them, feasted on the beetles all suffered a severe attack of priapism. Likewise yohimbine and apomorphine are both used but again both have extensive side effects from nausea to insomnia as they effect many parts of the mervous system as well.


Vitamin E in small doses can also increase sex hormone levels as a hydrophobic anti-oxidant. A 2008 study of 77,000 people testing a variety of vitamins for effects on lung cancer found higher dose Vitamin E supplements to be associated with an increased lung cancer risk, but the source data from the study shows that risks are reduced by 20% at the moderate dosage above (Slatore et. al. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 177 524-530 2008).

Prostate Care on 'Off Nights'

Many anti-oxidants are also phytoestrogens, and some also have specific anti-cancer properties. Many of the foods below have been shown in various studies to reduce the incidence of prostate and other cancers and in the case of pomegranate to retard existing prostate cancer.

• Soya (tofu or a glass of soya milk - genestein anticancer, phytoestrogen)
• Pumpkin Seed (β-Sitosterol delta-7-sterine inhibits dihydrotestosterone production)
• Red wine, grape juice, knot weed (resveratrol ~40 mg anticancer antioxidant phytoestrogen implicated in enhancing life-prolonging sirtuins)
• 1-2 Brazil Nuts (selenium ~100 mcg antioxidant) don't overdose!
• Tomato paste (lycopene antioxidant)
• Red onions (quercetin antioxidant)
• Green tea 2-3 cups (epicatechin gallate antioxidant anti-cancer - angiogenesis inhibitor)
• Asprin (1/5 300 mg tablet salicylate 60 mg daily)
• A whole pomegranate (anti-oxidant polyphenols) or pomegranate juice
• Indica butter (tetra-hydro-cannabinols anti-cancer angiogenesis inhibitor).

Grapefruit, which acts in a similar way to Tongkat ali, by inhibiting the enzyme CYP3A4 metabolizing estrogen, increases breast cancer by 1/3 - as much as HRT - so people should be cautious of natural products which act directly on sex hormone enzymes and receptors. Does this mean grapefruit is a female aphrodisiac?
The genestein in soya is a mild phytoestrogen which doesn't seem to promote female reproductive cancers and is protective against prostate and other forms of cancer, but note soya has been shown to reduce sperm counts and probably inhibits virility, if the sex frequency statistics of high soya consumption populations such as Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan are any indication.

The Thief in the Night steals the Holy of Holies

A little while ago I wrote and produced an unforgettable song you can listen to in mp3 called Black Rose, or the Rose of Sharon.

You can watch this as a YouTube movie in the form of Black Rose Nuclear Apocalypse, which has used the words of the song in a counterpoint to an apocalyptic warning about the threat of nuclear weapons overkill and the risks posed by the Israeli Samson Option.

The circumstances of this song and its words are highly provocative, troubling, blasphemous and an oracle that contains all the parables and paradoxes of parousia, from the thief in the night, through the goodman of the house, to the midnight oil of the bridegroom and the five wise and five foolish virgins, but to understand it, and what it represents, we need to see how the words arose, from a seemingly irresolvable conflict of values and ideals.

I had traveled to Jerusalem in the millennium on a rite of passage closing the circle of division and blood letting that began with the extreme violence of Yeshua's crucifixion as a blasphemous Jewish messiah, with leanings towards the fertility worship of Dhushara of Edomite Nabatea, in both his being anointed to his death by a woman who may have been his lover, and his pretensions to miraculous Dionysian theatre of cathartic renewal, resulting in a schism of the traditions, from which Christianity as the sacramental pole and Judaism as the covenental pole have never recovered. Although Christians like to think of Jesus as a Jewish messiah who was rejected by the Jews, the wildfire popularity of Christianity spread across the pagan world because Jesus had espoused the essential rites of passage of the sacrificed god-king in the fertility tradition.

The natural complementation of this schism is a gentile messiah who heals this division, along with Fall and the earlier schism between woman and man, ending the apocalyptic messianic era of dominion over woman and nature, in the reflowering of the immortal paradigm of the Tree of Life, as both the Jewish apocalypses and Revelation declare. The key to this is love, not just sexual and selfless altruistic love, but a love of redeeming the fragmented shards of cultural diaspora epitomized by the sparks of the Shekhinah, foretold in the Kabbalah.

With Jane at Tsvat on the Millennial Sabbatical

Anyway, while pursuing our research into sexual paradox, I struck up a strange e-mail correspondence with a latently bisexual Zionist woman from Tsvat (Safed), the memorable and intriguing Holy town of the Kabbalah, whose mausoleums and mountain tops, bristling with security intelligence antennae, we had visited on the millennial sabbatical. In the song she is referred to as Devorah, as from the book of Judges, but this is a veil for Doreen Bell-Zotan.

'Devorah's' and my diaspora dialogue focused immediately on the Song of Songs, שיר השירים, which I praised as the quintessence of fertility reunion between woman and man, and noted it may have older roots in Near Eastern cultures, from the Sumerian Song of Inana, through Syrian marriage rites, to the more recent Arab wasf love poetry paralleling the style of the Canticles, which one finds for example in Lebanon.

The opening verses of the song set out my verdant apology for the love allegory:

I am the rose of Sharon,
and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns,
so is my love among the daughters.

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow with delight,
and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

He brought me to the banqueting house,
and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples:
for I am sick of love.

'Devorah' took extreme exception to this interpretation, that the Song of Songs is the very Holy of Holies, a hidden secret codex, containing the most forbidden and deepest teachings of the Torah, and the very seal of the relationship of God with the bride Israel, surrounded by the briars of supernatural defenses to keep out all but the chosen ones.

This 'holy' view is of course the classic position, originating from Rabbi Akiva, who in addition to incorporating the Canticles into the Jewish cannon, anointed the Zealot warrior Bar Cochbah as messiah to the doom of all present, one of whom said "grass will grow out of your jaw Akiva!".

It is signed, sealed and delivered, despite, or precisely because of ,its sticky myrrh dripping off the handles of the lock, the 'head' filled with dew, and locks with the drops of the night. But let us never lose sight of the frankly sacrificial undertones of the lily among the thorns and the beloved who had withdrawn himself and was gone and could not be found by the lover smitten by the watch-keepers, just as the women wept for Tammuz and the lost Adonis among the blood roses of Lebanon and Galilee.

Just as we know that there are briars
surrounding the most magnificent gardens,
moats around castles, walls around mansions,
security systems and all

so the Torah has it defences
to keep unwanted trespassers out.
No Gentile has ever been admitted
and no one ever will.

But hell's bells! Wait a minute! The royal tradition of the messiah, as Solomon himself espoused, is to love the Queen of the South and to give her all she desired, and to let all one's wives and concubines worship their strange deities on every high hill and under every green tree, even as the hyssop grows out of the wall, and the bed of green is arched over by the cedars of Lebanon.

I dearly love the intimate and perennial fertility of the Hebrew tradition, by contrast with the guilt-ridden sex-averse Hellenistic paganism of Christianity, and the very idea of the Song of Songs finding its way into the common bible, merely as an allegory of Christ's love for his church, is a frank insult to the root immortal fertility and unsurpassed altruism of sexual engagement, without which neither we nor religion could exist. It is this root fertility that is also the souce of the messiah's transformative potential.

The Song of Songs in the Jewish tradition is not just a naughty little book of love poetry that somehow squeaked in the back door of the Bible, when eyes of the the sex-fearing church fathers were averted, but it is the covenant, the oracle and the secret text, of the very fertility that is at the source of the Hebrew tradition, not an insidious intruder, but the altar piece, inner sanctum, and cosmic portal to the mysterium tremendum, even if it is deceptively portrayed in Judaism as the love of God for the Bride Israel, in a manner not entirely different from the Christian sexual perversion of Christ and 'his' Church.

Noli me Tangere “And they say unto her, ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’ She saith unto them, ‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.’ Jesus saith unto her, ‘Mary’. She turned herself, and saith unto him, ‘Rabboni’. Jesus saith unto her, ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended’ ” , echoed in the Song of Songs: “I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer”

This itself is one of the most wonderful paradoxes of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, that a frankly Tantric sexual fertility allegory is the holiest of holies right at the very centre of the cosmic mystery of the godhead. Given the pretensions of mankind and the all too patriarchal absolute Gods mankind has spawned, to find our entire apocalyptic destiny revolving around the aching throbbing of unrequited sexual anticipation is a treat too intoxicating to dispel.

In glaring contrast to her bisexual explorations, more reminiscent of the subterranean undergrowth of Lilith than the Kosher Torah of covenant and commandment, 'Devorah' then claimed I was profaning the Holy book to lay claim to an heroic espousal of its love allegory, mindless as a thief in the market place, completely unaware of the inestimable value of what I was making off with:

Imagine a 'thief' has broken into your house
and stolen your very most valuable jewel.
he has no idea how much it is worth,
or where to claim the best price.

If you have the least humility or decency
you will realize this gem can never be yours,
and you will not attempt to hock it off
from a street stall at a cut price.

You are doing untold damage to yourself and all creation
posing as a spiritual thief,
nothing but a shameless pillager
plundering a pearl beyond price.

So is it to be the ultimate poetic irony that the Gentile mashiach is branded by the daughter of Zion as the very thief in the night which the Christian tradition prophesies will be the signature of the second coming? Doesn't this become a catalyst for all the allegories of Parousia to unfold?

So here I am the thief in the night
the lonely candle and the light
A bridegroom whose wedding is celebrated
when I have not taken a wife.

And know full well, if the goodman of the house
had known the hour that the thief would come,
he would have watched, and never suffered
his house to be broken through

So be ye therefore ready,
and trim your lamps and gather your oil
for the son of humanity cometh
at an hour when ye think not.

In response, 'Devorah' then enunciates a broad attack - in her own innocently racist words - on the 'white man' - in some sense a condemnation of the apocalyptic pretenses of the gentile, European culture, running back to the Roman invasions, and of the pagan distortions of the Christian tradition, beings who, by contrast with the elect of the covenant, are innately degenerate and wholly incapable of true spiritual understanding:

I do not know why the White man
has been created with a spiritual dearth.
Logical and intelligent, but of all human beings
most lacking in spiritual worth.

I have great compassion. It must be so terrible.
Living as a spiritual parasite,
stealing the sacred traditions of others,
the holies of the elect.

The abysmal emptiness in the White man
has driven him to conquer and to destroy
to engage in all sorts of perversions,
thinking they're a spiritual ploy.

In response to my claim that throwing the gates of compassion wide open could immortalize her in history, 'Devorah' then enunciates the ultimate defense of her higher status, among the chosen ones of God, claiming no matter to what degree she falls into error, unlike the pretensions of the delusional gentile to have a role in the redemption, she will always be brought back into the 'Elysian Fields' of the elect:

I don't need some delusional Gentile
to immortalize a daughter of Zion
my immortality is sealed and delivered
no matter if I sin or err ...

I will always be brought back into the fold.
This is the promise the ancient one made
to the children of Avraham and Sarah
a reward for them alone.

No wannabeing gentiles can ever change it.
I am closer to God even in my sin,
than you can be in your heights of purity.
so you can take it up with Him.

So what choice do I have here but to redeclare my love of the disdainful bride Israel, as the thief in the night I have become?

Devorah, you are a living wonder,
but don't condemn yourself so effortlessly.
Unsought immortality can come to leave us
naked and ashamed.

Thief in the night Mount of Olives, Millennium Eve and the light of the Bride Israel below.

For here I stand a thief in the night
In my darkest hour you are my light
A bride whose wedding is unconsummated
who I have loved all of my life.

Thus fulfilling the ambiguous history Jesus left, of the Bridegroom whose relationship with all his unattached women - Magdalen, that 'good part' Mary of Bethany was to play anointing him, Martha whom he loved, and the Salome of the Gospel of Thomas, upon whose bed he came up, - remains enigmatic and apparently unrequited, outside the repressed gnostic traditions, where it is claimed he and Magdalen celebrated the hieros gamos together.

The crucifixion procession. Magdalen has her face smitten with streaks of blood. "The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me" (5:7).

To heal this diaspora, the song then enters the inner sanctum of sexual reunion in the bedchamber, Christine entering the duet, to fulfill the marriage bond, complementing the cursed 'white man' with the occluded 'black woman':

Open unto me, my sister,
my love, my dove, my undefiled:
for my head is filled with dew,
and my locks with the drops of the night.

I rose up to open to my beloved;
And my spikenard flowed out to him,
and my fingers dropped with sweet smelling myrrh,
upon the handles of the lock.

Look not upon me, because I am black,
because the sun hath looked upon me
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth:
for thy love is better than wine.

'My sister, my spouse': Dark and light poles.
Chris and Christine on the shoreline of Aotearoa

The song then opens to the full panoply of sexual love, and the supreme irony of the wild-oats fertility of Solomon as fertility mashiach contrasted with the indulgent licentiousness of Matthew's alleged parable of Jesus as fertility bridegroom, accepting the five astute virgins who oiled their lamps and went with in the bridegroom to the marriage at midnight, but rejecting the five foolish ones who didn't keep their lamps oiled.

No Solomon would reject the five whose oil had run a little low. They are in fact the key to spark of sexual resurgence, bringing the lost Adonai back from the dead, rather than the 'life for a life' which Jesus lost, to 'bring Lazarus back':

Can you imagine anything more disturbing
than 'opening' to five astute young witches
who enter the marital feast at midnight
to celebrate their sensual delight?

And when the cup runs to overflowing,
five more virgins also toil,
begging for one's loving touch,
to replenish their midnight oil?

Could anything be more inspiring
to make one feel the flame grow higher?
To rise again right from the dead?
No more to be lamented!

Of course this sexual imagery is highly blasphemous to both the Jewish and Christian traditions, making the act of transgression in the now which Yeshua's mission did in the year zero, black verses, leaving an inforgettable imprint just by their very pronunciation, just as Jesus pronounced Isaiah 61's black verses and then claimed the Gentiles Naaman the Syrian and the Widow of Sidon were the only beneficiaries of the prophet's 'miracles', leading to him nearly being thrown off the cliffs of Nazareth:

Some songs can never be unsung.
We just can't get them out of our head!
No matter how hard we try to be free,
there's no end to the blasphemy.

You can hear it echoing from the cliff tops,
whispering through the tumbling waters
in our tears of sorrow and joy,
that these things have come to pass.

Catalysis and Social Redemption

Hello again, Chris. Thanks for responding ... On a humorous note, it almost sounds like you're living off mushrooms. ... I'm constantly playing the part of alarm clock for people around me. "Wake up! They're taking advantage of you and you're letting it happen!" Only a few people ever hear, though. I feel very much like a prophet. (Jonah to be specific.) ... I wonder sometimes whether sweeping social change is even possible anymore. Have things gone so far that the only way to have "sweeping" social change is through societal collapse? (I prefer to believe--like Jonah didn't--that people can choose to change and avoid the so-called wrath of god. That it is in our hands to repent of our ways and make a new way, thus avoiding disaster.) I lean toward Taoist belief, myself. And i wonder whether one should even make attempts to cause change...is that "going against the flow"? Or are my actions part of the flow? How can i determine which?

Hi ... Here's a brief response to the issues you mention ....

As I see it we have a relatively paradisiacal planet with an incredibly subtle climax biosphere with all manner of beneficial medicinal properties, from the life-extending and anti-cancer properties of muscadine wines and green tea, to the psychic visionary species, if we don't destroy the living bounty we coexist with through lethal planet-wide impact. We are also capable of making major technological transitions and the silicon revolution is one which brings us all much closer together, but given these we still are going to have to come to terms with how to live in a creative visionary way for millions of years to come.

The challenge to redemption seems to be more to do with the idea that human culture emerged from Machiavellian intelligence, in a Fall which creates itself a major dilemma getting from here to there, because it produces complex social systems involving a high degree of strategic bluff, accompanied by mechanisms of control, which don't easily give room for any simple transformation to an assumed enlightened age. Rather than succumb to a simple over-weaning truth of a prescriptive religious system, we have to absorb our way to any future 'golden age' through coming to the inevitable conclusion through freedom of information, astute knowledge and good sense.

Now I do believe that we can make a rapid soft transition to a kind of golden age of enlightenment and that the sort of dialogue we are having is catalytic towards this end. A lot of people become transfixed in the idea that nothing can change, that we are powerless, adrift in the larger political and social forces, often of an irrational nature, driving the zeitgeist.

My involvement with chaos and bifurcation has taught me that abrupt transformation is possible and can happen surprisingly quickly. I also really like the idea that the current social milieu is a kind of false vacuum and that a more enlightened social community could spring up as a true vacuum - a lower energy natural condition, into which the old order implodes without a violent revolution - this is all by analogy with the theory of cosmic inflation also triggering the the divergence of the forces of nature making complex molecular systems and sentient life possible.

The internet, and the global village, which makes it possible for us to have this conversation, is a potential part of such a 'tipping point' of human social networking, leading to the ability for each of us to take personal responsibility for the fate of the planet, which is what I believe we are all incarnated in the mortal realm to participate in [and what the concept of the messiah is all about].

While I think it is possible to be an enlightened catalyst for such change, I'm not sure it's conducive for a single organization to try to promote it as a movement, although I'm warmly receptive to participating in throwing the [apocalyptic] covers off reality, with others who might seek to do so as a mutually creative exercise in redemption, and to lend what experience I have of the source condition to that end.

I do 'live off the sacraments' in a kind of way. I stopped partaking once for seven years, but I kept having dreams of more and larger and more inscrutable fungi echoing with their iridescent experiences, appearing in the oddest places, until I realized it was part of the fabric of my incarnation. I only commune with the psychic species very occasionally. It's like my life is sailing up a long tortuous fjord and the visionary experiences are the tacking points, where we 'go around', trying to avoid getting 'caught in irons' and gaze into the hazy distance, from outside the inside out, to chart the next line of strategic healing 'attack'.