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'.

Cosmic Apocalypse Now

The Amazon 'burning season'.

In a previous posting in this blog is an image of cosmic evolution, in which sentient conscious observers (in the figure it is Charles Darwin) form an interactive sigma limit of complexity on the cosmic equator, mid-way through the life of the universe, as fundamental in nature as the alpha of the cosmic origin and and the omega of its eventual demise.

This picture implies that conscious life, although seemingly an insignificant fragile phenomenon on a small planet in a peripheral solar system in a physical universe dominated by violent forces of creation and destruction, from the big-bang to black-holes, is the supreme inheritor in interactive consummation of the cosmological processes which gave rise to the universe in the first place.

Life has existed on Earth for over a third of the universe's existence
(click image for blowup).

If we look more specifically at planet Earth over cosmological time scales, we find that life has existed for most of Earth's history and that it is a phenomenon spanning cosmic time-scales. All the more significant that we come to terms with the fact that the emergence of humanity culminating in our cultural explosion and a major ecocrisis for planet Earth is a unique catastrophe liable to face any habitable planet as a pivotal point of transition in its emergence from biological diversity into planetary consciousness.

Religious Apocalypse and Archetypal Unveiling

Our understanding of apocalypse is an 'unveiling' - the covers being thrown off reality. The apocalyptic epoch emerged out of the idea of God acting in history and was championed by the Zoroastrian concept of a cosmic renovation at the end of time in which the forces of darkness and ignorance would be purged and the forces of light of Ahura Mazda would prevail. This then became absorbed by Jewish apocalyptists and by the time of Jesus had become a major motif combining the political tumult in Israel with the idea of the Day of Judgment, a final reckoning in which the sinners would be damned and the righteous saved, leading to the Essene apocalypses and Jesus claiming in the synoptic gospels to be a messiah who would return on the right hand of Power to establish the Kingdom of God.

Subsequently, writers, from John of Revelation to Muhammad, have penned fire and brimstone descriptions of a cosmological tumult, which in the case of Revelation involves a triage of all living beings, as the stars fall out of the 'flat earth' sky amid the bitter waters of Wormwood and scenes rife with the fall of Rome combined with mythical visions of the demiurge of God on a white horse, the woman standing on the moon, the seven headed beast and the great whore of Babylon.

Eden Chagall

But there is a deeper current woven into this matrix running back to Eden and before the to the African rift valley and human emergence itself. The Fall from Eden is a fall from a paradise of natural harmony. In a deep sense, it is a portrayal etched in the collective consciousness of our loss of relationship with nature, apparently precipitated by a falling out of trust between woman and man. The Garden of Eden, (and with it older variants, such as the Sumerian Hullupu Tree and the Temptations Seal), is thus an outstanding archetype of our retreat from intimacy with nature and our sense of falling out with the natural world and between the sexes as the tumults of urbanization, patriarchal dominance and warfare came to wrack human life.

Sumerian 'Temptation Seal' shows motifs of the serpent,
woman and man, and the tree of life.

Of course religious traditionalists see the Fall from Eden in terms of a betrayal of God in which Adam, as man, is seduced by Eve, as woman, into deviating from God's design, in eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which the woman though to be life-giving wisdom, rather than divisive knowledge. Note that this feminine Wisdom cries our from everlasting as the primal consort of God in the Proverbs. The forbidden fruit brings us back again to the Tree of Life hidden since the foundation of the world, which reappears at the End of Days in both Jewish and Christian apocalypses confirming the intimate relationship of nature to our ultimate destiny.

Both Revelation's and Enoch's End of Days
involves the return of the Tree of Life

As religious and social thinking moved from the agrarian ideas of natural cycles of regeneration to the strategic notion of a society, or of God, acting in history, so the religious imagination closed in on the End of Days as a final hard landing of our dysphoria with both God and nature, embodied in the dire tumult of an Armageddon-style violent apocalyptic unveiling. This is reflected firstly in Zoroastrian then Jewish and particularly Essene eschatologies, then taken up by John the Baptist, and after him Jesus, and much later, in the shadow of the Jewish tradition, by Muhammad.

The Pope as Apocalyptic Anti-Christ

Affairs of the time of Jesus were certainly apocalyptic in this tumultuous sense. The Roman siege of Jerusalem was said to have ultimately killed over a million people or perhaps one in fifty of the people alive on the planet at the time. The Sea of Galilee ran red with the blood of the Zealots and the Jews were scattered over the face of the Earth in the Roman diaspora. It is easy to see how devout religious believers in the decades leading up to this crisis conceived of it in terms of a cosmic catastrophe, in the way writers like Zechariah described, and why these conflicts still rumble on in the wild visions of the book of Revelation.

However the Fall is a deeper collective awareness of future shock, running all the way back to our emergence out of Africa and the accelerating changes we have experienced, as we made the transition from a gatherer-hunter way of life, in which women and men had complementary roles in maintaining survival and fertility, intimately intertwined with nature, into burgeoning urban societies, in which military coalitions, and the ensuing patriarchal dominance, gave rise both to prescriptive religions reinforcing male reproductive imperatives over women, and increasing competition and violence in war and the rumours of war between competing cultures and empires.

Dürer Apocalypse: The Stars falling out of the Sky

Central to the Eden myth is a sexual falling out, which, rather than declaring woman is the fallible sex which distracted man from his relationship with God, attests to a cultural transition to patriarchal dominance overthrowing the complementary sexual relationships of the gatherer-hunter life, in which women provided the majority of the diet, and retained a degree of strategic autonomy over their lives. In turn, the strategic paradox of our highly asymmetric human reproductive investments promoted super-intelligence and our explosive cultural emergence. Thus it is the rise of patriarchal dominance and imposition of the male reproductive imperative that has led to the Fall, and all its tumults, from the destruction of nature, to population explosion, genocide and war.

Fra Angelico Day of Judgment:
Verdant paradise versus scorched-earth hell.

The term apocalypse means 'unveiling' and its meaning naturally applies to a sexual marriage, so that we need to come to terms with the fact that to resolve the falling out of the Fall, we need to unveil the reunion between woman and man in terms of mutuality and complementarity rather than domination. Kabbalistic accounts of the End of Days contain precisely such a sexual motif in the sparks of the Shekhinah, the feminine face of divinity, which retreated from concord in the Fall and later through all the follies of mankind, returns as shattered 'sparks' coming together to redeem the epoch of paradise in reunion in matrimonial concord.

These motifs are etched in archetypes in the human stream of consciousness, as successive generations have tried to come to terms with an ever-accelerating future shock, amid the tumults of war and the rise and fall of empires, famine, exile and diaspora. Along with the archetypes of the Mother Goddess and the heroic messianic Lord the archetypal fall from paradise represents a valid imprint on the collective stream of consciousness summing up our cultural explosion and head-long change into a planetary crisis which has become also, in physical terms, a cosmic apocalypse of planet Earth.

Smokeball Earth: clear skies (left) are replaced by a smoke-hazed planet
during a bad Amazonian burning season (centre).

Cosmic Planetary Apocalypse

We who stand in this generation can see that a cosmic apocalypse is upon us, which dwarfs even these historical times, in an irreversible transformation which is throwing the covers off reality and changing the face of the planet in a way which never can be repeated unless humanity destroys itself in the process, rendering our species extinct.

Not only have we opened the flood gates of knowledge, reaching towards the ultimate understanding of cosmogenesis, unveiling the forces of nature and the ultimate origin and destiny of the universe, but we have discovered the details of evolution, organismic and molecular biochemistry, unraveled the genetic code, and at the turn of the millennium decoded the entire human genome.

As long as Earth lives into the millennia and millions of years to come in future, this explosion of knowledge and the ensuing global impact of a single species remains a unique transition, happening only once in the four billion year history of the planet.

On the dark side, we have crossed a series of perilous bridges leading to genocide and mass extinction. We have discovered ultimate weapons of nuclear mass annihilation, invested in a forty times planetary overkill in a knife edge strategy of mutually assured destruction. Added to the arsenal are biological weapons of potentially uncontainable pestilence.

More directly, through a combination of unrestrained venture capital exploitation and an attitude of dominion over nature, we are causing increasingly catastrophic impacts on the whole planet's biosphere and climate, spanning wide scale habitat destruction felling the great forests, over fishing the oceans, distorting the atmosphere through increased carbon dioxide, and other contaminants damaging the ozone layer. The result of this is a rapid phase of global warming, which is increasingly likely to melt major portions of the polar ice caps and could cause a rise of the ocean by 1.6 m this century,a s well as disrupting the majority of habitats of living species. These impacts are causing a mass extinction of the diversity of life which has taken tens of millions of years to recover from the last great extinction of the dinosaurs.

All in all then, it is clear that this transition is both one which is tumultuous and accompanied by a genocide of life, paralleled only on scales of tens to hundreds of millions of years, and which, if we survive it, will constitute a unique transition from biological evolution to planetary consciousness, which can happen only once in the planet's four billion year history, if we don't destroy our selves in the process, leaving an opportunity for a 'second coming' of planetary consciousness by another species later, although even this is debatable if we trash the planet in becoming extinct. This is thus a cosmic apocalypse and one we should rightly comprehend and address in such terms.

Rape of the Planet and Genetic Holocaust

Rape of the planet has become something we take for granted. It has become a central figure of speech and an assumption about the existential condition, as if such actions are an implicit part of human nature. But the very metaphor indicates that patriarchal sexual prerogatives are driving human impact. Rape is, by its nature sexual, and intimately connected with male violence. It is brought into an altogether unseemly conjunction with our deep cultural emphasis on the Earth as ‘mother’, becoming at once an original sin of mankind - the rape of Mother Earth.

Patriarchy and Population Boom and Bust

Historically the human population grew only very slowly from about 2.5 million at the beginnings of urbanization to some 50 million around the time of the black plague of the middle ages. It is only with the industrial, scientific and medical revolution and the colonial expansion of Western powers, that the world population has climbed to dizzy heights. During the 20th century, the world's population increased almost fourfold, from 1.6 to 6 billion. Until very recently there were fears that in the next century, world population would explode to some 12 billion people, leaving little room for wilderness areas to preserve wildlife and putting extreme pressure on food production, water and non-renewable resources.

At a time when there has been a manifest need to curtail runaway population growth, the leaders of the world’s great patriarchal religions have, almost without exception been ordering their populations to continue to multiply making frontal attacks on any effective form of contraception and family planning. The leaders of both the Christian and Islamic world share an agenda of male reproductive right and a calculated determination to multiply the faithful by advocating unrestrained fertility even in the face of the manifest damage such policies have caused.

The attitude of world leaders has also been irresponsible and self-serving. While leaders of major western powers push for ever greater gross national products, honing their economies as if there was never an end to increasing production, 9/10ths of the world population sinks further into poverty, losing educational, resourcing and livelihood opportunities.

Fortunately 2002 figures showed a drop in fertility. Current trends suggest a population in 2050 around 9.2-9.3 billion (UN, Population Research Bureau BBC 18 Aug 2004). To everyone’s surprise in 2002 a very significant drop was detected in the fertility rates of a broad spread of diverse countries spanning the developed and developing world comprising half the world’s population and with little in common between their governments and social attitudes.

Top left: Historical population trends. Centre: Falling fertility rates in 2000. Top right: Falling predictions 2002 may see the world population peak at about 8 billion by 2050 although many predictions still anticipate 10 billion. Increasing use of contraception (lower left) and improved female education (lower right) both correlate with falling fertility rates and reduced population pressure.

There are some notable exceptions. Conservative Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan still have some of the highest birth rates on the planet.

By any standard of ecological biodiversity conservation, all these population figures are vastly too high to preserve existing ecosystems. More than a third of the planet’s land surface including its most productive land is now commandeered for human monoculture.

World frontier (virgin) forests as they originally stood and as they stand in 2000. There are additional areas of secondary growth and other regeneration , but these tend to have predominant weedy species and not the climax diversity of virgin forest and jungle (World Resources Institute).

Mass-extinction of Biological and Genetic Diversity

Nowhere are the disastrous effects of the patriarchal view of dominion over nature and winner-take-all exploitation of resources more clearly expressed than in the destruction of Earth's major ecosystems, the felling of our great forests, and the mass extinction of the living species of the planet with its consequent loss of genetic diversity, which could haunt us for millions or tens of millions of years.

The Earth is entering the sixth great mass extinction recorded over evolutionary time (Leaky and Lewin). All previous mass extinctions of biodiversity were precipitated by huge astronomical disasters. The dinosaurs were wiped out by one or more asteroids which plunged the Earth into a ‘nuclear’ winter after causing global flash fires burning up much of the natural cover, setting off volcanic activity in its wake opposite in India, followed by a dark cool period and then sudden global warming, leaving oxygen levels semi-permanently reduced by a third. But this is just a blip on the map of biodiversity compared with the Permian extinction in which 90% of living species became extinct, amid what is believed to have been an even greater impact which first caused the oceans to recede by perhaps a third and then rise again in an oceanic flood. Such extinctions always been caused by massive interventions, cometary or asteroid impacts, supernovae, massive volcanic intrusion or solar flares.

What is absolutely unique about the sixth extinction is that it is not being caused by any such disruption, but simply by the explosive exploitation by a single species who ought to know better and that it is completely unnecessary and deleterious for this species’ own survival. It is estimated that over 25% of living species will become extinct in the next 25 years unless radical world-wide efforts are made for collective conservation on a genetic, species and ecosystem-wide basis. Long term prediction by the end of the century could see more than half the living species disappear.

Decline in species populations reflects a world rate 100 to 1000 times greater than normal and predicted to rise to 10,000. 90% of large predatory ocean fish are already gone from overfishing. Loss of biodiversity will result directly in human poverty and hunger. (See http://www.maweb.org/en/index.aspx 2005).

This mass extinction is being caused by a host of factors, but habitat destruction and the islandization of the great tropical forests and their diversity hotspots into unsustainable fragments, which cannot sustain species diversity are pivotal and systematic overfishing of the oceans to exhaustion. Logging, poaching, release of exotic species and pollution all play a serious part, as well as burgeoning threat of precipitate climatic change.

Paradise Lost? History and Projected Future of Life’s Diversity

No matter how grandiose our technological pretensions, humanity depends on living species as foods, medicines and the key to our commercial products to survive. Yet at the same time as we are mindlessly tearing down the remaining biodiversity hotspots, having only characterized about a tenth of the living species, or the medicinal or life-enhancing properties they may contain, we are also busy reducing the genetic diversity of the species we do depend on. The use of monoclonal hybrids, on a world-wide monocultural scale, genetically modified varieties, genetic cloning and the choice of varieties which have no hope of surviving in the wild are reducing the innate viability of the species on which we depend and hence our own viability to a vanishing equation. Our food production and distribution systems are becoming ever more dependent on high technology, while the naturally viable ‘heritage’ seeds from which we derive our commercial varieties are given no viable habitat, are stored in gene banks where a power failure could render much of our genetic heritage ‘dead-in-the-water’ overnight and the patenting of wild varieties by large agrochemical companies such as Monsanto ( who recently tried to buy the rights on virtually all wild Chinese soya varieties at the same time as marketing round-up ready soya) thus taking these very species out of the human orbit altogether.

The innate robustness of the biosphere which brought us here is being reduced to a fragile human technical fantasy. When the triple-witching hour of natural catastrophe arrives, we could be a defenseless blip on an ever more precipitous and accelerating boom and bust chart. Given the unremitting exploitation of nature and the consequent instabilities to human survival, the human species may become extinct (Leakey and Lewin R403). This is clearly an issue of patriarchal short-term, winner-take-all, boom-and-bust exploitation of the Earth with no long-term nurturing strategy to compensate. It raises huge questions about the role of Western democracies and corporate capitalism as entrenched institutions of patriarchal power and exemplifies the way sexual dominion can lead to an irrational and wholly damaging situation which escapes our civilized control.

Trends in global warming as of 2000 from the Cambrian to the present.

Climatic Chaos and Human Hubris

As shown in the above chart, during its history, the Earth has seen major shifts in temperature, often accompanied by changes in the level of carbon dioxide or CO2. These have generally been accompanied by major changes of an astronomical nature, such as changes in solar brightness, or volcanic changes to the carbon dioxide content, and major evolutionary changes in the biota such as the advent of photosynthetic cyanobacteria in the ocean and land plants.

The Gaia hypothesis proposes that the biota and other geological cycles are involved in a form of homeostasis which helps to maintain Earth’s environment in a stable atmospheric state, however there are also clear examples of processes which can instead bifurcate and flip into a new stability pattern locking us into a runaway warming. Venus for example has a runaway greenhouse effect which has driven the surface temperature to 400 oC. Carbon dioxide which is an almost universal output of our carbon-based economy is the major chemical contributor to atmospheric global warming.

There are already signs of major disruptions to both the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets which seem to be accelerating. Changes in global temperature may also be linked to a more chaotic climate with more frequent costly and damaging storms and changes in the North Atlantic conveyor which powers the Gulf Stream and keeps the north from extreme winters. However by far the most serious effect is the potential destruction of genetic and species diversity. The above map shows the regions of the planet which would remain stable to several current predictions of global warming. Most areas are expected to go through such climatic shock that neither the plants nor animals endemic to the areas will find themselves in a viable climatic habitat. The pace of global warming is so rapid that there is no time for plant species to spread by seeding and whole ecosystems are predicted to die out. Global warming is thus one of the potentially most major contributors to mass extinction.

Life zones remaining stable in four different global warming models.

Per capita emission of CO2 in metric tons per person per year. Green coastal areas are threatened by rising oceans. Sample figures: Qatar 16.9, USA 5.2, UK 2.63, China 0.42, India 0.21 illustrating the excessive emissions by developed nations. The US produced 23% of world emissions. Over 80% of Brazil's emission came from forest burning. Sumatran peat fires contributed as much CO2 as Western Europe (King redrawn from 1996 data).
This is a clear case of the principal world superpower acting as a rogue nation in the interests of competitive exploitation of economic advantage over the rest.

Predicted state of the Amazon by 2020
New Scientist 15 Oct 2005 35-39.

In addition to significant indications of melting in Antarctica and at the North Pole, there is also evidence that because of massive influxes of melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland that the North Atlantic conveyor, which carries energy equivalent to a million power stations, is failing because of the distruption of circulation caused by the mass of cold fresh water dumped into the Arctic. This is likely to cause severe winters in Northern Europe despite an overall warming and significantly increase ocean levels. The average sea level is predicted to rise by up to 1.63 m by 2100. This would be caused by the thermal expansion of the upper layers of the ocean as they warm and from melting glaciers. The most dramatic such change, the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which would lead to a catastrophic rise in sea level of 6 meters, is now considered unlikely during the 21st century.

Mutually Assured Destruction

By far the most direct and troubling manifestation of the nightmare of unbridled patriarchal dominance is the endless gravitation towards a paranoid scenario of final conflict in a highly patriarchal Armageddon type apocalypse between the forces of light and dark epitomized by the ‘evil empire’ be it Hitler, Soviet Communism, Islamic fundamentalism or Saddam Hussein and his illusory weapons of mass destruction, or the President of the United States claiming if you are not with us you are against us.

We also need to be mindful that it was the allies who developed nuclear weapons as a final solution, to counter Hitler’s ‘holocaust’, sparked by the scientific genius of Jews whose relatives had been incarcerated or killed in the Nazi death camps, and that the first detonation at ‘truth or consequences’ took place in the name of the Christian Trinity. Oppenheimer even cited Bohr's vision of ‘complementarity’- that although the Bomb might be the greatest disaster to have befallen humankind, it may well be a great blessing, ‘a turning point in history’.”

Left: The Trinity bomb. Right: The Trinity test at 300 ms. Hiroshima: Humanity gains the ultimate powers of mass extinction of life. A transition to the prospect of mutually assured destruction in patriarchal combat.

Michael Ortiz Hill (R315) describes the godly patriarchal ‘climate’ as follows:

“It is impossible to ignore or to diminish the religious element that turns up again and again in the accounts of the Trinity blast. ... It was named by Oppenheimer, invoking by way of John Donne the mystery of the martyred and resurrected God: ‘As West and East In all flat maps - and I am one - are one. So death doth touch the Resurrection.’ ‘That still doesn't make a Trinity,’ Oppenheimer confessed - and then speculated that perhaps he was influenced by a better known poem, one of Donne's Holy Sonnets, beginning, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God; for you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend Your force to breake, blowe, burn and make me new’. After Trinity, Thomas Farrel wrote: ‘The effects could well be described as unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying.... The lighting beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.’ ... Other observers were more explicitly religious in speaking of the event. ...It is striking that, following Oppenheimer's lead of naming the site of the first nuclear test “Trinity,” Weisskopf and Laurence - both Jews - saw in the Bomb the glory of Christ. ... William Laurence wrote that it was like being ‘privileged to witness the Birth of the World-to-be present at the moment of Creation when the Lord said: ‘Let there be light’. He compared the experience to witnessing the second coming of Christ. ... Ferenc Szasz notes, “Others whispered, more in reverence than otherwise: ‘Jesus Christ’. Another striking theme that repeats again and again ... is birth and paternity. William Laurence called the rumblings of the Trinity explosion the ‘first cry of a newborn world’. ... Teller sent a telegram to Los Alamos saying simply, ‘It's a boy’. ... one notices a vivid absence of the feminine amidst all this imagery of birthing.”

Debate continues about the wisdom of unleashing the world’s first nuclear war on Japan and the fallout that has continued since. It is clear that actually carrying out such an act is the clearest provocation possible to the Soviet Union for its own defence to immediately embark on a program of nuclear weapons, leading directly to the nuclear Cold War and the build-up of enough nuclear weapons to lay waste to the planet 40 times over.

This situation dramatically reduced the viability of the human race to one small accidental error, amid the continuing strategic jockeying for the capacity for a unilateral first strike, in which a variety of circumstances, including unusual cloud cover and miscommunicated weather rocket launches several times nearly caused and accidental nuclear mobilization. This philosophy of MAD mutually-assured destruction became a psychic and social deadlock that overshadowed much of the 20th century, leaving many people uncertain whether to have offspring because of root uncertainty they would have livable lives to lead.

Left; Ground zero from satellite during the fire. Centre: Chernobyl radioactive.
Right: The global extent of the radioactive contamination cloud.

It was only with the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl, fifty times as polluting as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, its name “bitter grass” echoing the resonances of the Biblical ‘Wormwood’ and its bitter waters (Kravchanka 1990), that the spell of this gaze of fatal nuclear attraction was shattered and people on both sides of the dissolving ‘Iron Curtain’ realized that things had gone too far. We however need to continue to be mindful that, despite a closer dialogue with Russia, we are still in a state of 15 times overkill and that the nuclear threat is becoming ever more subtle and complex as the impossible ‘war on terror’ itself a contradiction terms, motivates smaller groups to mount a counter-cultural act of asymmetric warfare.

Genetic and Reproductive Apocalypse

At the same time our own natural human viability is being compromised by runaway biotechnology including IVF, routine Caesarians, the drive for often cosmetic germ-line engineering and male-driven eugenics, including artificial wombs, and ambitions for cloning, from religious and utopian movements and their leaders. All it would take is a small astronomical mishap to bring on a mass extinction of humanity from a complete failure of the food distribution system. Even a small asteroid impact on a brittle culture in a damaged biosphere, dependent on computer planning, highly technologized food-distribution to urban centres dependent on agro-tech, and foodstuffs, made using genetically engineered agricultural species which have no natural viability, with a human population propped up by extreme medical technologies, could cause almost certain demise of humanity, from the very brittleness of the society we have generated, to natural disruption.

Fluorescent mouse pups genetically engineered with jellyfish gene.
GE iridescent fish are now becoming a fish collector's dream.

While these technologies, used for the right purposes, have great potential to do good, it is natural diversity upon which we depend to survive and diversity we should foster. Without a clear ethical consensus from society at large to protect genetic diversity, the gene technology industry stands to burst the bubble of living diversity while playing scientific and financial ‘he-man’. We urgently need to heal these wounds to our viability through an appreciation for the sustainable evolutionary endowment we possess as a species.

Mouse growing a human ear for transplantation
illustrates an 'unnatural' application of biological technology.

The Shin-Tao of Apocalypse

The Woman of Babylon on the beast with seven heads in the Apocalypse: Dürer

Views of the messiah as apocalyptic saviour are diverse and confused. They are dominated by Jesus as a 'Dionysian Essene' mingling both Essene final apocalypsis and the fertility rites of Dhushara of Nabatea in a mission of miraculous dread. The pagan fantasy of the second coming, or parousia, of Christ, eclipses this hyperbole in the form of a demiurge riding a white horse in the sky, waving the sword-tongue of apocalypse, while the populations sway in fear, and the 144,000 elect rise to heaven, while the rest are cursed to hell.

Another more fertile and lushous view of the messiah is that of Solomon, the king of the first temple and a period of Hebrew unity and royal splendour, despite the fact that he had 300 wives and countless concubines, and loved both the Pharaoh's daughter and the Queen of Sheba and let his wives worship their strange gods and goddesses, as well as dabbling himself in the occult arts and knowing the plants from the hyssop to the cedar. The Song of Songs as Holy of Holies attests to the power of the messiah as sacred fertility king in complementary relationship with the Shulamite bride.

I have tried to show you another persona of the messiah as a person, who helps throw the covers off reality in evolutionary time in a scientific and sexual unveiling, healing the apocalyptic desecration of planet Earth, and restoring the complementarity between woman and man, thus sustaining the diversity of life throughout our generations. I have tried to show you that this is both a natural and a conscious intentional process, with shamanic dimensions, requiring an understanding of the cosmological, evolutionary, sexual, social and sentient roots of our existence. The messiah is one who shows us that we are incarnations of the cosmic source and here together to redeem the universe, in love, through the preservation of the evolutionary Tree of Life, and the protection of the diversity of conscious life on the planet. This is itself the one great apocalypsis of planet Earth, culminating from the evolutionary emergence of life and then humanity and culture and our patriarchal Fall from Eden, through accelerating future shock, to the rape of the planet and nuclear mutually assured destruction - a unique crisis of transformation, which every intelligent planet must face, hopefully no more than once, in its conscious awakening.

There have of course been many other messiahs, from Bar Cochbah to Shabbati Zevi, and many other heroes and religious and political revolutionaries, from Moses and Buddha, through Jesus and Muhammad to the Raj Nishs, Jim Jones's, Che Guevaras and Bin Ladens of the present day, all of whom have postured as leaders of world movements of one kind or another, with results whose dangers of jihad, utopian crisis and the dilemma of the apocalyptic following, are well-described in fictional allegories, such as Muad Dib's plight in Frank Herbert's 'Dune'.

A vital counterpoint to this full-frontal idea of messiah as heroic leader is the lesson of Lao Tsu, the 'old master', who walked with the birds, and who, as the story goes, set forth to leave civilization for the wilderness, but was fortuitously imprisoned by a guard at the Great Wall, until he produced a work of posterity - now known as the Tao te Ching. It is also said that the guard left with him, and that he also taught the Gautama and that Confucius parried with him to his horrific nemesis.

Although Lao Tsu's heritage is more subtle than the hero-worshipping religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, and the guru worshipping aspects of Vedanta it is as enduring and pervasive as any of these, and far closer to nature, also reflecting more closely the root complementation of female and male principles, generally lost on its patriarchal cousins. The Tao of the 'Tao te Ching' is unseen, but not transcendent, being the root of all things. It's 'way' of the valley leads to a return to the natural condition and even to the primordial state. It is this primordial state that I manifest as an incarnation of the cosmic source, compassionate of the mortal coil, and the mass extinction of living diversity by human kind.

Taoist sages have led an example of anonymous existence in wu wei - the enlightenment of the Tao drifting freely is a state of mind experienced more easily by the unknown - a 'hermit' living in the midst of society rather than a leader posturing in the full glare of the Machiavellian affairs of state and distorting the enticements of popularity and power.

After leaving Jerusalem, where I performed the millennial rights of passage from the apocalyptic age to the reflowering of the Tree of Life in the reunion of woman and man, I traveled to India and Nepal to pay my respects to the dark Goddess Kali as a persona of liberation of the feminine, just as Jesus quoted the Queen of Sheba would bear witness to his own messiahship, as she did for Solomon, having himself been anointed to his doom by a woman of decidedly ambiguous reputation, rather than a 'kosher' high priest.

The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with the men of this generation, and condemn them: for she came from the utmost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here (Luke 11:31).

Subsequently to my messianic march from the Ascension site on the Mount of Olives, via the Gates of Mercy, to the Wailing Wall, I vowed to go the way of Lao Tsu, and have remained at the antipodes, punctuated only by trips to Asia in which we have explored the worlds of sexual paradox and its expression in Eastern paths, from those of Indian Tantra, through Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism, to Zen and Shinto during our last journey this year to Japan.

The Japan trip brought this paradox of concealment back home in a rather neat and simple way. Through the shrines and temples we visited and the energetic festivals we attended it became rapidly apparent that, despite its rather xenophobic reputation outside Japan as an exclusive national religion, Shinto is an aboriginal neighbourhood tradition nurturing the positive life force, complementing of the negative mind-centered renunciation amid mortal ego-suffering and moral exhortations of Buddhism.

1. Video of Kasuga festival, Kyoto
2. Video of Otsu Matsuri, Otsu
   
3. Video of Hikayama Matsuri, Kakunodate
4. Video of Kishimojo Shrine, Ikebukuro, Tokyo

'Shin-Tao', which translates as the Tao of the Gods, also expresses the sexual paradox, in its many fertility Goddesses and only partially concealed sexual rites, and expresses the Samurai code of honour without moral imperative - an amoral spirituality of the evolutionary survival of life.

Tamamo-no Mae

While we were in Kyoto, we went to Otsu matsuri, where chimakis - good luck charms made of woven rice straw were scattered to the crowds, along with some small good luck scarves. We ended up bringing a couple of chimakis and a scarf with an enigmatic fox with nine tails scuffing up dirt in the face of the onlookers. This proved to be the kitsune or fox with nine tails whose story originates with Tamamo-no-Mae (玉藻前) a beautiful peerless female courtesan, whose real identity was claimed to be a nine-tailed fox out to seduce and kill the emperor when he mysteriously fell ill and she abruptly disappeared. The fox kitsune was killed, variously by a great warrior, or a Buddhist monk, and turned into the stone of death sesshoseki-zan - a volcanic boulder spouting underworld gasses, that killed anyone that touched it. The same night, we came coincidentally upon the animé series of Naruto, the ninja kid who is also an incarnation of the fox with nine tails, which has also become a potent symbol of supernatural power. The more tails a kitsune has — they may have as many as nine — the older, wiser, and more powerful it is.

The ninja form a subterranean counter current to the samurai, whose code of honour means they cannot take on subversive deceptive activities without losing face, so ninja were often mercenaries hired by feudal Lords as mercenaries to be the underground complement of the samurai defenses operating subversively behind enemy lines, as well as being a secret society of protectors of local villages. Thus ninja gains the underground metaphor of stealth, in the etymology dating back to the 8th century. Ninja consists of the on'yomi or original Chinese reading of the first and last kanji of shinobi-no-mono (忍の者) - "to steal away" and—by extension—"to forbear," - another term being oniwaban (お庭番 "one in the garden"). Mono (者, likewise pronounced sha or ja) means "person." The nin of ninjutsu is the same as that in ninja, whereas jutsu (術) means skill or art, so ninjutsu means "the skill of going unperceived" or "the art of stealth"; hence, ninja and shinobi-no-mono (as well as shinobi) may be translated as "one skilled in the art of stealth." Similarly, the pre-war word ninjutsu-zukai means "one who uses the art of remaining unperceived."

The 'skill' of the ninja is thus the skill of effecting change by stealth. The way of the ninja is a Dionysian version of transformation, counterposed to the forthright approaches of the samurai and the kingly messiah, which Jesus whipped up in Galilee, and Muhammad exploited in Medina and Mecca.

The critical point is that Lao Tsu's way is both as effective ultimately in creating a sustainable heritage, is far superior at avoiding entrapment, and is closer to nature, just as the covert streams of natural shamanism have been for millennia. To coexist at the antipodes is both a practical exercise of participatory authorship and a shamanistic vigil watching the mass extinction of life and the follies of world leaders, political, economic and religious intent on agendas of winner take all greed, religious utopian ascendancy by force of violence, and the lethal gambits of utopian apocalyptic endgames; at the same time, through one's astute compassionate gaze, seeking the healing in the unfolding of a reasonable way out to a soft landing for humanity and the biosphere which sustains us that emerges from the consciousness of humanity in response to its own crisis.

In the same way as Lao Tsu, I am leaving sufficient traces of the unravelling - postcards form the edge of existence - in the form of blogs, books, videos, and songs which form a kind of koan - a puzzle spread across the noosphere of the web, which those who have the insight and resourcefulness to chart, can discover to be it's own unique teaching into the nature of incarnation in the likeness of the cosmic source redeeming reality by participating in its conscious evolution.

Jesus did finally adopt the covert exit, vanishing mysteriously after being taken away early from the crucifixion, so that we still don't know what happened with the women afterwards and whether he died, or may even have survived, as some researchers, such as Hugh Schonfield and Robert Graves have suggested, after carefully staging his Dionysian demise.

Despite falling for the apocalyptic 'Kingdom', which caused him to claim futilely that some before him would not pass away before he returned on the right hand of Power,

Jesus said unto them, 'Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power (Mark 9:1).

Jesus understood this mission of 'stealth', which itself is both theft and personal concealment, both in his astute sayings in the Gospel of Thomas,

It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will I find me there (Thomas 77).

and in the metaphor of his coming as a thief in the night:

And this know, that if the goodman of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched, and not have suffered his house to be broken through. Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not (Luke 12:39).

Christians haven't realized three essential paradoxes in their bondage:

Firstly the messianic tradition is a living one, regenerated not by pagan demiurges, who we worship on crucifixes, or swear by as a feudal Lord and saviour, but real human beings responding to changing crises, by invoking a paradigm of long-term future goodness, to refertilize the living generations.

Secondly the church is only a steward until the next messiah appears who will not be a Christian, nor will they fulfill the Christian messianic expectation, because they will burst the bubble of perception, to invoke a new paradigm, as this is precisely the act that makes them a messiah. The paradigm of the Tree of Life is the successor of the messianic apocalypse ensuing from the Fall, and here the whole heroic edifice crumbles.

The third and final key is that the thief will not be stealing up on us to frighten us in the day of judgment, but is, on the contrary, as I speak, stealing away, to avoid the very trap of apocalyptic dysfunctional catastrophe the heroic leadership paradigm inexorably gravitates into, taking the unwary with it into the black hole of religious bondage and violence.

Prophesying NY and the Iran Israel Apocalypse

In July 2001 a friend I met in Jerusalem came to visit me to take the sacramental vigils with his partner, who is an Arab Israeli. We took the sacraments in a peninsula overlooking the islands of the gulf and later in the crater of a volcano.

After they left, I began to sing a radical song, The Song of the Biosphere, which somehow came out of our vigils together, turning the tables of Jihad from Holy religious War, which I abhor, to the rape of the planet and George Bush's refusal to act as a good steward, in terms of global warming and its impact on biodiversity. It is also produced as a YouTube video Jihad Song of the Biosphere.

You tell us tales of Hollywood,
of Star-wars and the common good
you told us global warming was a litany of lies
factory chimneys were the prize
you claim all living creatures are your intellectual property
you fail to ratify every treaty which doesn't give you more
have I heard this all before?
when it comes to the final struggle, jihad of the biosphere
there's only one true rogue nation, the great American shaitan
big brother, you are Uncle Sam.

At the same time it was the Gnostic awakening, in the midst of genocide, in the persona of an Icarus calling us to cross the Styx, but the words had instantaneously come true in manifest physical terms in the planes passing through the trembling towers, reflected also in the mentality of the act of violent martyrdom:

‘nothing will never be the same’ and ‘more than we can bear’

can we touch the sky?
can we fly so high
we'll pass right to the other side
and never fall in flames?
will we ever be the same again?

we'll become the living soul
the primal source the shining goal
the beginning and the end of life
the happiness and the pain
can we bear it all again?

The song was produced the same month and I posted an e-mail of the lyrics on 20th July 2001 where it still lies.

On 9-11, I sat watching live BBC coverage, when the two planes, one by one, flew into the trembling towers. Suddenly the words were becoming real, line by line, as the second 747 passed ‘right to the other side of the tower’, only to hideously ‘fall in flames’ piloted by Islamic martyrs believing they were becoming ‘living souls’ meeting the face of al-Llah. Individual lines began popping out of the TV set as the night wore on - the photographer’s “nothing will ever be the same again” as he looked up to see the plane hit directly above and Giuliani’s ”this will be more than we can bear”.

It was as if I had mythopoetically declared Holy War and it had come to pass through another agency, in a way I had never intended. The aftermath became an echo of other verses, the wreckage-filled smouldering canyons of downtown Manhattan, in words unknowingly addressed to Bin Laden:

if you take them away,
how can we find what we came for?
what can you say,
when it's all our future lives that you play for?
walking in the twilight,
down in the valley of shadows
when will you comprehend
the damage you have wrought ... in your indiscretion?
can we undo the death trance you have set in motion?

And the recovery process ...

will you discover
the fabric of love that ignites us?
can we embrace
the ocean of life that unites us?
all our lives long
this journey has been our destination
if we get this one wrong
will there be any chance for restoration?

Nevertheless the song was not a declaration of jihad, but rather the final struggle of biodiversity facing impending mass extinction which I had quite correctly drawn attention to in terms of the failure of the Bush administration to take a position of good guardianship of the biosphere in the name of capital gain, intellectual property rights, and the oil economy.

Having pronounced the jihad song of the biosphere and found it come to pass through another agency led to me singing the Song of Sakina, lamenting the repression of women under the Taleban and in Islam, as a penance for the whole concept of jihad as unholy violence and sharia applied to women. Again this was produced as the Sakina Lament YouTube video.

Sakina Lament
Oh al-Llah, did the prophet blaspheme you?
Why have they taken your name in oppression?
Are Ninety-nine names of a god of destruction
the merciful, compassionate All?
New York, New York, why did your sky fall?
Osama bin Laden is this inspiration
to bring a destruction, not on the guilty
but family, children and all?
Did you not understand that for life to abide
the love flower to blossom, the life tree to flourish
we all need healing, to feed all the hungry,
and not flaming genocide?
We know that the capital machine is corruption,
that the winners take all and the losers are trodden on.,
that this is not a true way of compassion,
not wholly civilized.
We know green pastures are crumbling to desert,
the waters of life and the tree are neglected,
that justice is blind in the power of the dollar,
as the towers of investment grow higher.
We know we can all become a great Satan,
embracing violence, instead of compassion,
when we think we are right, have God on our side
and set out to rule the whole world.
Do you imagine that imposing Shariat
would make the world naturally compassionate?
Why can't you see that imposing on anyone
is contrary to divine law?
Why behead the Jews of Medina
when all that they did was to argue and bicker?
How can you claim Jerusalem is Holy
when the daughters of Sarah are defiled?
When the peace of Sakina spoke at Hudaybiyah
she uttered to heal - to make the world holy
she sang as Shekhinah - from the canvas of Sarah
so we could at last become whole.
Muhammad, why did you then murder Sarah
on the first fateful day that you came into Mecca?
Why did you not heed the song of Sakina
the singers tongues cut from their mouths?
Oh Islam, why crucify al Hallaj
just for declaring the truth - "ana al Haqq"?
Why can't you see there is no final prophet
in a living regenerating world?
Why did you make all your women wear burqah
just to conceal the prophets many lovers?
Why is a woman only half of the value
of man, possession or beast?
Why can't you trust men to set eyes on women?
Why can't you allow all mothers and daughters
to make their own minds up quite freely
in the unveiling the Quran prophesied?
Why was it stated by al Bukhari
that the prophet Muhammad at one time lamented
that the world would never become complete
till the women of Daws wiggled free?
Why did you curse al-Llah's triple daughters,
al-Uzza, Manat and and al-Lat first and foremost
from times long ago in the deserts of Sinai
the divine and wisdom, together forever?
Why did you have to leave for Medina,
Why did Khadja expire from her hunger?
Why did you think that the angel Gabriel
would speak to you with Satan's forked tongue?
Why did you put a death curse on freedom
why can't each person choose what they believe in?
Why threaten every believer with death
if they also love Mary, or Elizabeth?
Why do you not drink the waters of Hagar
out of whose spring sprung the palm trees together,
why do you not feel the pain of Aisha?
and the love of Fatimah?
When is the time come to light up the candles
of peace in Sakina of plenty together
so that all the world's paths can finally gather
whole in the gentleness of peace?
The time has now come for the flight of the dove
to bring back the olive, to unchain the grove,
to throw all the gates of mercy wide open
so that the world can be one.
The time has now come for us all to replenish
and cherish the Earth's generations forever
in the warmth of the heart that can never be broken
in the light of the love that is life.
My last evening’s sacramental vision gravitated towards the nuclear apocalypse of Iran and Israel. Isn’t it on everybody’s mind? But I’m worried that this is a case of fatal attraction, as a moth to the candle flame. The US doesn’t want another Iraq, so even GWB can’t yet bring himself to bomb Iran, but the Israeli’s consider they may have to, because Iran has sworn to wipe Israel (or the Zionist Satan) off the face of the map (Earth), so the US is potentially passing Israel a poisoned chalice through the dilemma of its own making in Iraq.

Even pragmatic Rafsanjani said in 2001:

'the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.' On the other hand, if Israel responded with its own nuclear weapons, it 'will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.'

Now this is all tied up with the end-of-days. Iran’s current president Ahmadinejad made reference to the Mahdi in his first speech to the U.N., and both he and members of his group saw him bathed in a ‘green light of protection’:

"Oh mighty lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace."

As we also know he has denied the holocaust, said Europe or America should make a homeland for the Jews if they caused this 'crime', and said in so many words that Israel should be wiped off the map, claimed the Zionist state is a rotten tree, whose branches will fall, and declared that the countdown button to its destruction has been pressed.

The appearance of the Mahdi is intimately associated with the ‘second coming’. Jesus is supposed to reappear as a living man who becomes a Muslim convert at the Mahdi’s behest and leads the Christians to worship alongside the Mahdi in Mecca, thus giving Islam its final domination over the world in the end of days.

The Hebrew concept of the mashiach is also a human male whose illumination gives rise to an epoch of long-term future goodness. Jesus pushed the messianic persona into the apocalyptic dimension, of end-of-days conflict and has been turned into a Melkarth. We know Jesus will never return on a cloud in the living biophysical universe, so the Christian hope of a non-human messiah is doomed. However the Mahdi could emerge, because, in the Islamic tradition he is a human. Ahmadinejad considers himself the herald of this man. Moqtada Sadr called his own following the Mehdi Army. It’s only a matter of time before a charismatic ayatollah assumes the mantle.

It’s not just the nuclear issue in Iran that is at stake, but giving the world back its fecundity and fertility in relationship to paradise. Islam is the youngest and most adolescent of the paths of the book. It poses a significant risk of oppression and domination, not just to women, but to the world, because it has not evolved beyond the confines of its own sixth century tribal origins and clings to a monolithic idea of Quran, Sharia and Islamic state in diving the world between the domains of submission (Islam) and war, Dar al-Harb, in violation of the peace principle of Sakina or the Shekhinah - the feminine face of divinity - which Muhammad referred to in brokering the peace treaty of Hudaybiyah which was subsequently abrogated when he chose to march on Mecca.

American capitalist domination, aggression and nuclear trigger-happiness is also a very major threat to the planet, which is partly attributable to the Christian apocalyptic mentality and preparedness to invoke ultimate ascendance or a ‘rapture’ in one form or another, combined with an attitude of dominion over nature, common to the desert faiths. This end-game also needs to be tamed and healed, although it probably means the nemesis, or even demise, of Christianity as we know it.

In response to the prospect of this overall high noon, which we all want to avoid in favour of an apocalypse which is the unveiling of a bridal reunion, I have sung the Mahdi Refrain and produced it as a YouTube video Apocalypse Iran Israel. The lyrics use the words of Iran's Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad, Israel's Peres and my own response to this utopian apocalyptic dilemma, set to news footage of the corresponding international and news events.

The Mahdi Refrain

This said Ayatollah Rafsanjani
'the use of even one nuclear bomb
inside Israel will destroy everything.'
On the other hand, if Israel responded
with its own nuclear weapons,
it 'will only harm the Islamic world.
It is thus not at all irrational
to contemplate such an eventuality.'
This said president Amadinejad
"Oh mighty lord, I pray to you
to hasten the emergence of your last repository,
that perfect and pure human being,
the promised one that will fill this world with justice
the promised one that will fill the world with peace,"

My main mission is to "pave the path
for the glorious reappearance of Imam Mahdi,
may Allah hasten his reappearance."
On the last day I was speaking, one of our group told me
"When you said 'in the name of Allah,'
I saw a light coming and surrounding you
and protecting you to the end."
"he saw a green light come from around me,
and I was placed inside this aura,"
"I felt myself the atmosphere changing,
The UN were looking as if a hand was holding them,
and they had just opened their eyes
Halleleuyah Alhamdulillah!"
All praise belongs to al-Llah,

"The establishment of the Zionist regime
was a move by the world oppressor
against the Islamic world,"
"There is no doubt that the new wave [of attacks]
will wipe off this stigma from the face of the world."
As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."
"Anybody who recognizes Israel
will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury,"
"They have created a myth in the name of the Holocaust
and consider it to be above God,
above religion and the prophets."
“The near future will be in the hands of Islam”,
"The Zionist regime is a dying tree,
and soon its branches will be broken down."

"We believe that Iran is trying to buy time …
so it can develop a nuclear bomb,"
"Iran is a clear and present danger."
A nightmare for the international community
This is "tantamount to a crime against humanity".
"Iran presents a danger to everyone"
and it can also be wiped off the map."
"The combination of fanatical ideology,
a warped sense of reality and nuclear weapons
is a combination that no one can accept,"
"Ahmadinejad represents Satan, not God,"
"History knew how to denounce madmen
those who wave their sword and acted this way
ended their careers accordingly,"

If they have a little bit of a brain,
they would not commit such a mistake,"
Iran is a powerful country."
"If you committed this big crime,
then give a part of your own land in Europe,
the United States, Canada or Alaska to them,
so that the Jews can establish their country,"
"If your civilization consists of aggression,
making oppressed people homeless,
suffocating the voices of justice
we say that we hate your hollow civilization,"
“History has shown that when Muslims become powerful,
they do not use their power to the detriment of others,
but use it in the service of peace and tranquility”

Islam has four times as many young men of fighting age
as the aging populations of the decadent crumbling West
the Imam's return will coincide with an apocalyptic battle
between the forces of evil and righteousness.
If the infidel loses its nuclear advantage,
it could be worn down in a war of attrition
at the end of which surrender to Islam
would appear the least bad of options.
And that could be a signal for the Imam to appear.
"If Jesus were present in the world today,
who would be facing him and who would be following him?"
God willing, Jesus would return to the world
along with Islam's holy prophet, Imam Mahdi,
and wipe away every tinge of oppression,
pain and agony from the face of the world,"

They say the Mahdi will teach Jesus to pray in Mecca
They claim the Mahdi will take Jesus to the Ka’aba,
"I emphatically declare today's world, more than ever,
longs for just and righteous folk with love for all humanity;
and above all longs for the perfect human being
the real true savior who has been promised to all peoples
who will establish justice, peace and brotherhood
across the planet, far and wide"
"Oh, Almighty God, all men and women are your creatures
and you have ordained their guidance and salvation.
Bestow upon a humanity that thirsts for justice,
the perfect human being promised to all by you,
and make us among his followers
and among those who strive for his return and his cause."

"The arrogant superpowers and the Zionist regime
invested all their efforts but their pride has been trampled
"With God's help now, the countdown button
for the destruction of the Zionist regime
has been pushed by the hands of the children
of Lebanon and Palestine, ...
By God's will, we will witness
the destruction of this regime in the near future".
"This is a fake regime ... it won't be able to survive.
those who created it can take it away themselves.
They should not let things reach the point of explosion
If an explosion occurs across international boundaries
It will also burn all those who created [Israel]
over the past sixty years".

A statement repeated three times is never an accident
"They want to wipe out Israel ... Now when it comes to destruction,
Iran too can be destroyed
[but] I don't suggest to say an eye for an eye,"
"Israel would defend itself under any condition
but Iran is a danger to the world, not just to us."
"Under the UN Charter, all members have undertaken
to refrain from the threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity
or political independence of any state."
"We can prevent all of this threat,
without resorting to weapons of mass destruction
if there will be unity," But If the crucial moment comes
and they are incapable ...then they endanger their existence

If you want me to come and pray with you at the Ka’aba
Then first renounce the archaic tribal law of Sharia
Invite every one of us to come in the name of our own religion
And terminate the scorched Earth theology of submission.
There will never be harmony until we can live in freedom
From domination and violence, in the name of utopian vision.
Cease the atrocities of martyrdom and the slaughter of the innocents
And live your days in merciful and compassionate coexistence
The apocalypse is the unveiling of matrimonial reunion
in which men forsake their violence and learn to live with women.
Stop the the death fatwas, and stoning women for adultery
and trust them in their sovereignty and love them in their liberty
For this is the way the generations of Earth will survive in splendour
And bring to men the ecstasy that paradise hungers after.

Tags:
9-11, Islam, Sakina, Messiah, Ahmadinejad, Iran, Israel, Peres, nuclear, holocaust