Friends,
I write this on the eve of the long Memorial Day Weekend. It is a national holiday when Americans commemorate the fallen in all their wars. Many of these men fought and died killing other men who were fellow Christians and adversaries consumed in the meat grinder of battle often uttering prayers for victory to the same Jesus Christ before lips grew pale and cold and they were interred in fields marked by Christian gravestone crosses as a common fate.

Out of love and compassion for them, I turn my meditation upon a deeper loss. My Memorial Day weekend is dedicated to the burial of a true master under the tombstone wherein a false name is inscribed.

I anticipate this article will be a test for many a reader – after I have delivered the following response to a certain Christian evangelist named “Tom” – to see if they will ever return to the pages of Hogueprophecy.com

Tom wrote the following invitation. Please note that the correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization and inserts are mine to make his “offer” of salvation readable at least. I believe either reading articles or reading my book about Nostradamus’ unique take on the coming of the Antichrist in our times inspired it. You can read an overview of the book by clicking on: Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named MABUS.

TOM
John, the answers you seek are in the world of Christ. Why are you looking half way around the world? Release the preconceived ideas that have been placed in your mind your entire life. The answers are pieces of the great cosmic Christian jigsaw puzzle. Once one good piece of the puzzle is understood, many others will fall in to place as if by magic. If you cannot change your approach, you will be looking for Mabus [Nostradamus’ code name for his Third and Final Antichrist for] another 25 years.

Dear Tom,
Thank you for caring. Understand that the following from beginning to end is sent to you in love. Just remember while reading it that any other negative feeling you may experience from absorbing these words other than that compassionate love, is coming from your side, not mine. (That also goes for anyone else reading this letter to Tom):

***

I have never looked “half way around the world”. I ever look, this moment, right here and right “now” for truth. Where else can truth be if it is not an undiscovered country within me, waiting to be explored, renewed each moment and understood?

There is no “Christ” to find but a far better truth to free. Your “Christian jigsaw puzzle” is a Ouija board of canonized bunk burying your beloved master and redeemer with the borrowed dirt of mind.

A consumer of faith ends up seeing an authentic inquiry into the mystery of this great Creation and its Creator consumed by conversion to a body, a corporation of canon law. When you buy into Big Business religion your soul is sold, outsourced to a state of retardation of the human spiritual quest for true understanding.

Tom, that is what organized religion is: a dead end that you buy into. Yours is one of many corporate religions with its board of directors from Vatican to superchurches peddling a line of product prophets. You bought into the Corpus Corporate Christi Religion, yet all multinational fundamentalist religions corrupt and retard individual spiritual inquiry. They induce you to believe that your full stop in spiritual progress inside their religion “store” is a final arrival to salvation. This purchased belief closes a transaction that only an unconsciously motivated act of retail ignorance can buy. The high price you pay is that of converting just another ignorant customer wholesale to a belief system. You are now under contract not to question this belief otherwise you will be thrown out on your own, like the “heretic” – the name derived from an ancient Middle Eastern term for a black sheep that wanders astray from the herd of believers.

Believers are consumers of the qualified ignorance of such mafias of the soul, whatever name is plastered on their shop, be it an advertisement for Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Sikh, Pagan, New Age, Theist or Atheist brands for sale.

In your case, Tom, you walked through the door of a shop peddling a whole load of goods called “Christianity.” This early cult start-up in two millennia became the dominant religion of the Piscean Age.

A religious cult is nothing more than a new business competing in the religious marketplace. If it can convert enough of the market share to go mainstream, putting its stock for sale on the DOW-de-Ching Industrial Exchange of belief systems, it gains holy caché and political clout.

A cult becomes a religion when it attains mainstream political power. Christianity gained religion stock status when the fourth-century Emperor Constantine the Great required and received endorsement of Christian leaders in his civil war with other usurpers for the Imperial Roman throne. Ever the political animal, Constantine remembered his “friends” and legalized the Cult of Christianity as a legal “religion.”

Afterwards, ever the great Roman organizer and Romanizer, Constantine made a religious corporate merger. He melded upstart Christianity into the other monotheistic mainstream religion of Rome, his own pagan faith called Sol Invictus.

Much of what you presume as fundamentally “Christian” actually does not come from the Jew who preached the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Key elements in Christianity’s identity are derivatives coming from Emperor Constantine’s golden rule: “Those who have the gold, rule.”

While he was alive Constantine believed he fulfilled the Second Coming of Christ in “his” name. The Christian fathers did not complain nor resist his forming up a corporate Christian religion at a board meeting better known as his Council of Nicaea in 325 c.e. That is when he helped launch big business in Jesus worship with tithes and indulgences. In addition, this corporation attained to every greedy billionaire’s most cherished dream: a monopoly free of regulation and taxes. If today corporations can become people, Corpus Christi Corp long ago did one better: it became “God”.

When you become God incarnate-corporate, the religion-biz need not answer to any human being or ethic. Thus this corporate “Antichrist” took on the name “Jesus Christ”. The Lord parent company licensed and made a brand out of a person who once walked the Earth and taught the good news from the heart and soul, not from the very heart of being “sold”.

Is it any wonder, Tom, that the name “Jesus Christ” makes such a great cuss phrase?

Perhaps it is indeed cursed?

You, Tom, and all other people identifying with this Jesus Christ and being Christians, have been flimflammed by a false faith cloaked in a shrewd marketing ploy. When you base this ploy on blind and unquestioned faith in the company you can convert half the world by making sure the man who survived crucifixion does not survive your marketing strategy for conversion. I think second crucifixion of a master by his own believers was best explained in the following observation (I used this quote in my book Messiahs: the Visions and Prophecies of the  Second Coming):

It is something very natural to the unconscious state of humanity. The living Master is a danger, but the dead Master is no more a danger. The living Master can wake you up; you cannot dodge him, he simply goes like an arrow into the heart. But a dead Master is a dead Master. He is just a memory, he is no longer there.

And now the disciples start worshipping him. Why? It is out of a feeling of guilt that they never heard him while he was alive. They feel guilty, they repent. Now they have to do something to get rid of the guilt. Worshipping is out of guilt…

People crucified Jesus, and the same people started worshipping him. It is repentance. They started feeling a great pain, a great heaviness, a great anxiety. They had done something wrong; they had to compensate, they had to worship this man. They condemned him as a criminal and they worshipped him as a God.

…When you worship a Master you start creating a Master to your own idea – hence the myth springs up. The myth comes from your unconscious. The Master is physically dead, now you want him to be spiritually dead, too. The myth will do it: he will become spiritually dead, too. Your myth is a lie! And the more the Master becomes surrounded by myth and fictions, the more and more unreal he becomes.

That’s why it is very difficult to believe that Jesus is a historical person…It is because of the mythology that has been created around him: he walks on water, he turns water into wine…

The people who created these myths are really getting rid of the reality of the Master…Death has destroyed his body, myth will destroy his spirituality. He will become just a mythological figure, utterly impotent, useless.

…No living Master ever fulfills anybody’s expectations; he lives his own life. Whether you accept him or you reject him makes no difference. You can kill him, you can worship him, it makes no difference. He goes on living his own way, he goes on doing his own thing. He cannot be forced to fulfill your requirements of him.

Osho (1979) The White Lotus

To me, the myth of Jesus Christ is the Antichrist because it promotes a false memory to bury the real master. A new resurrection of this master is needed. I suggest the first step towards that resurrection is to pull off this Greco-Roman mask glued over the face and memory of Yeshua.

Ever heard of him?

He was once the authentic source of Christianity’s inauthentic product advertisement.

Why not start praying to “Yeshua”?

That was your Jesus’ name until canon-corp. marketed something different: a new opiate dei.

Your prayers have not been going to the right address since that traveling Jewish salesman from Tarsus, St. Paul, turned Yeshua’s ministry into a variant of a Mithraic Persian cult so the mainstream Roman world would eventually buy stock in it.

St. Paul knew how to peddle a new religion beyond its Jewish reformist roots. If you wanted to get a Gentile’s attention in the Roman world just strip Yeshua of anything smacking of Jewish mysticism and turn him into just another son-of-a-Persian-virgin-bitch myth. The concept of a Son of God sacrificed, then resurrecting back to life is not an original idea coming from Christianity. It is borrowed. Just make your Jesus perform the holy Eucharist of the Persian Messiah, Mithras, which, by the way, is almost lifted verbatim into the Christian bible.

For example, I wrote the following about this in my 1998 edition of the Last Pope:

Most Christians would recognize the following words as an important cornerstone of their religion:

“He who shall not eat of my body nor drink of my blood so that he may be one with me and I with him, shall not be saved.”

Do you think this is Jesus talking?

No way, Hosea!

These words are from the Mithraic communion.

One of the early Christian Fathers, Tertullian, upon reading St. Paul’s similarly worded description of the Christian communion, damned him as the Devil’s agent for smuggling heathen rites into Christianity.

So, Tom, set yourself free of this fake two-thousand-year-old corporate religion and its marketing tricks. Otherwise, Matthew 7:13-23 may be about you and the entrepreneurial Mafiosi of the soul that seduced you and all the vast host of others who have flocked and followed the false prophet of Jesus Corp. through their wide gate of lies.

Enter by a narrow gate. The gate is wide that leads to perdition, there is plenty of room on the road, and many go that way; but the gate that leads to life is small and the road is narrow and those who find it are few.

Beware of false prophets, men who come to you dressed up as sheep while underneath they are savage wolves.

You will recognize them by the fruits they bear. Can grapes be picked from briars, or figs from thistles? In the same way, a good tree always yields good fruit, and a poor tree bad fruit.

A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, or a poor tree good fruit. And when a tree does not yield good fruit, it is cut down and burnt. That is why I say you will recognize them by their fruits.

Not everyone who calls me “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but only those who do the will of my heavenly Father. When that day comes, many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, cast out devils in your name, and in your name perform many miracles?” Then I will tell them to their face, “I never knew you; out of my sight, you and your wicked ways?”

Christian Corp. teaches believers to think this passage is about somebody other than them.

What if these verses apply to anyone who has followed and prayed to, and done good deeds, prophesied and cast out demons in the name of this false memory of Yeshua, called Jesus Christ?

If we could get in a time machine and go back to Galilee in the first century and if we called out “Hey Jesus!” Yeshua would not recognize that name. That was not his name. Why then do we keep sending your prayers to a false address?

I think it is because the “wolves” in Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Coptic and Protestant reverends’ clothing are leading us astray through the wide open gate like a herd of sheeple to the slaughter of truth.

Tom, it is time you begin recognizing the bitter fruits of this ugly tree of corporate mainstream religion that has hijacked Master Yeshua so long ago and led people under the label of “Christians” into more crusades, pogroms, massacres, forced conversions, inquisitions, witch hunts, witch trials and wars than any other competing corporate mainstream faith. Out of the fowl grape of this tree of anti-life is a juice made mostly of the blood of Christians who over two millennia prayed to the same Jesus as they marched off to war often against each other. In the name of the “Prince of Peace” and his love, his forgiveness and resurrection. More people have been murdered in wars fought by Christians than any other religion – many of which fill the silent stone cemeteries we will visit or reflect upon this Memorial Day Weekend.

I will reflect on something else this weekend:

The only true “antichrist” is our unconsciousness.

We can wake up from this.

***

You might rightly ask how one does wake up? My answer is meditation. I can give you links and information about what I know of this science of self-observation if you ask for it at this link: meditation.

My understanding is that meditation is not religion. It is not a belief system. This inner scientific discipline makes one more alert, sensitive and undisturbed by life’s lies and identity attachments.

I foresee meditation will be the basis for a transformation of the religious search in the coming 20 centuries of the new Aquarian Age. In that age, religion will discard its blind faith business and get to the real business of inner spiritual transformation.

The Piscean Age we leave behind was an epoch of faith. The Aquarian Age will be an epoch of Science.

In the Aquarian Age, spiritual progress will not be achieved by believing in things but by questioning and witnessing things of this world and of the inner world of mind and emotion.

The hypothesis of meditation available for such experimentation is this: Is consciousness beyond the body-mind, beyond life and death, beyond duality, beyond change and the changeless, beyond time and eternity. Is there a higher reality that passeth all understanding and misunderstandings of the mind?

If what I have written above has not scared you away, but stirred something long dormant inside your heart, it is only because some taste of meditation guides those words despite my egoistic self.

The gate to this truth is very narrow. It is only wide enough for just “you” to pass through it.

John Hogue
(25 May 2012)

PS—I expect this article will stimulate a whole lot of feedback from readers. Send that feedback to this link: Contact Me. If your feedback about this article is pertinent, concise and well written, it will appear inserted below under COMMENTS with my replies. Thus I invite you over the next four days of the Memorial Day 2012 weekend to frequently visit this article archived at this link: Jesus Christ. There you will see all your comments and my answers. If you want to be notified when the flood of responses have come in, join my free Newsletter.

YOUR COMMENTS START HERE

I will be replying to all of these comments starting sometime later today. Here below are the first batch of them. What then follows is the regular comments box.  If, by the way, you are having problems placing comments in that box, just send them through the contact link on the menu page. I’ll then post them here. Thanks for your observations be they positive or critical. I read them all and try to answer them all too.

FRAN
Hi John. Before the onslaught of negativity ensues I want to say “THANK YOU!”

Here you have managed to put into words the ‘feelings’ I have always had about Memorial Day, a mishmash of patriotic/religious ideals focused on one holiday that elude me entirely.

“Why do we kill people, who are killing people, to prove that killing people is wrong?”~Holly Near

Your analogies always make me chuckle… the storefronts of religion unfortunately have some of the most eloquent ‘barkers’ as in most amusing carnivals…

***

HOGUE
They do indeed, Fran. I was surprised how few chickens flew out of the newsletter coup all fuss and feathered about this article. Most of the replies have been quite positive. The more critical writers appeared in the Comments Box at the very bottom of this page. You can all scroll down to see my inserted responses to them. Now onward to Joyula:

***

JOYULA
Thank you for your helping to bring forth truth. I am waking up. I have not been in any particular direction. I thought that I was lost…and I was…but I also realize that something in me knew that everything has been a lie. I have experienced many of the lies and false information and false people. I am coming alive because I now see my purpose for being, which I could never find before in the five senses. I was feeling alone and hurt. Not now..I have a greater sense of peace and love and I can go forth and be a part of creating the new paradigm. I am truly homeward bound..not ever to return to this third dimension. Thank you.

HOGUE
Thank you, Joyula. Sounds like a good beginning. Spiritual discontent with all things is a blessed take off point. It was the basis of my final essay in Predictions for 2012. The epilogue is called “The Future belongs to Spiritual Survivalists”.

***

MIMIMOMIE
Amen, Brother John. Once your eyes are open to the truth, you can never go back. From a former church CFO its all about the money. You will be saved only if you give your 10% (20,30,40). The simple truth is all you need is yourself to connect with the creator. The rest is hogwash.

HOGUE
The disciples of Jesus need to recreate their religion in this new Aquarian Age. They need to go back to the beginning. Back to the time when Jesus was Yeshua and Imperial Rome had not marketed something else, placing popular mythologies of virgin births, holy ghosts boffing under-aged unwed virgins and Sons of Persian Gods being crucified and resurrected.

If Christians chose not to drop these Romanized myths at least they could understand the origins of the word “Christ” and become Christs rather than second class their spiritual dreams as mere “christians”.

The term “Christ” means the “anointed one”. The Greek word Christos actually derives its root meaning from the early Sumerian word for anointed one, which was “smeared with semen.”

Now, we need not go there with Christianity and make it a step in the Kama Sutra of the Tantrikas, but a more essentially “Tantric” approach is the way of the future in religion. Tantra says, go through a thing to understand and transcend it to the divine. Rather than be a mere sheeply christian, why not go through being anointed with consciousness? Be the Christ that no big-biz Religio-bunkollah will deceive. Stop being sheep,

Be human beings.

***

TOM
prophesy only comes from god. read again century1 number2. you don’t disagree with the seer do you?

HOGUE
You do not know this is true, that propheCy (you mean the noun, not the verb) only comes from God. That is qualified ignorance talking. Not you. You borrowed that one from someone, Tom. That is just being a religious parrot and it has no authority when we are parrots.

“Polly want a Jesus crikey?”

***

TOM
please read in revelation 13-13, 15-2,and 16-12. then see what little time is left as revelation is a timeline.

HOGUE
The Book of Revelation was a work meant for fulfillment in St. John’s time, not ours. That is very easy to prove. Just see the link I just left in the last sentence. Moreover, St. John was given this book by an angel working as go between for Jesus. Why did Jesus not talk directly in spirit to St. John himself, hmm? Was he too busy to give direct support to this channel? I mean, it is the last word in the new testament, Revelation. Why did the son of god negotiate a scripture’s composition through an angelic agent? This is a little fishy.

Why are there at least 21 references from this middle-angel-man to the prophecies of Revelation being set up as an event around the corner, in the lifetime of St. John and his contemporaries? Why indeed does Revelation 13:18 describes the number of the Beast  (Antichrist corresponding to the Greek and Hebrew letters that add up to “Neron Kaisar” (Emperor Nero)? You will have to do better than bring in this prophetic failure as witness to your argument, Tom.

TOM
You’re right, organized religion is a problem. this of course includes hinduism. perhaps all those so called christians in the graveyard forgot the commandment about thou shall not kill. and athiests who don’t believe anything are willing to go to war for some strange poorly thought out ideas.

HOGUE
Wrong again, Tom. So much of Christianity is based on very bad translations from medieval scholars that did not know their Aramaic from their “arse”. The commandment is “Thou Shall not Murder.” To murder is to kill someone that is not sanctioned by the religion, the state or the corporate powers that control them. To kill Muslims, Cathars, Native Americans and witches was not “murder” because it was sanctioned by Religio-corp.

And as for the Hindus, I have hit them well and often in my writings. Just check out what I wrote in Messiahs: The Visions and Prophecies for the Second Coming. Atheism is just another Theist religion. Being anti-God still keeps you chained to the God as big daddy in the sky myth.

Grow up Atheists. Move on

TOM
it would appear only i know mr mabus. where you seek you will never find. or you know and know it is better not to tell.

HOGUE
Only “you” know Mabus? Hmm…You seem to be a koo koo. Chuckle… Are you that “Tom” who inspired the blog from above? Or, are you just another Tom, Dick, “hairy” Mabus? I have a whole file of people who think they are the antichrist or know the antichrist, or think they are Jesus or “know” Jesus in a biblical sense. You are not alone. If you are that “Tom”, thank you. If you are not him. Thank you.

***

LANCE
As a retired engineer and scientist I gave up on religion, but never the belief that there is something more, even a quantum form of energy amongst all living things. I agree with you in regard to your findings and research that religion blocks its ‘corporate’ believers from a true connection to everything that really is good.

HOGUE
The word “Religion” in its etymological roots means to regard or look into again. Most dictionaries use “respect” which is unfortunate because that leads people astray of the true meaning. Most people see “respect” as a blind honoring of authority. The word “respect” means “to look back” or “to regard,” It means to re-spect (look again). From its original meaning, religion sounds more in harmony with meditation, which is about looking, seeing, witnessing. Observation and meditation are disciplines of objective and subjective science.

Faith and blind respect is a kind of dirt that has besmirched the word. Religion’s more investigative and inquiring meaning comes from ancient times.

  ***

PAUL
Excellent! I have been saying much the same things for a long time now, good to see it in print from someone who can get it out to the public.

HOGUE
Thank you. Here is how you can help me, Paul – and the others reading this. You all can share this page link with your Internet social communities. You can also share the link to your friends of Facebook or Twitter and ask them to pass it along and share with others.

Here is the link to cut and past for your friends:

http://www.hogueprophecy.com/2012/05/memorial-day-for-jesus-christ/

 ***

PATRICIA
I humbly bow to you my brother for your clarity and firmness. Like clear, still water that reflects as a mirror and the one who would argue for his case in such a reflection who only wishes to have his expectation and not the Truth, and therefore would rather host only his self-satisfaction unawakened.

HOGUE
Indian mystic Meher Baba said of our time that we are in the peak period of the “manyness of illusion”. That means to me that the waters of the mind wherein the moon is reflected are so stirred that the moon’s reflection is shattered into thousands of frenetic shards of broken light. Meher Baba said that manyness of illusion would take 700 years to become the oneness of illusion for the human race. In that far off time of earthly paradise, the reflection of the moon will be perfect in still mind waters. Yet, this is only a “reflection.” One must turn around and behold the moon.

The moment where this can happen is right now. Seven hundred years from now, it will be “right now.” We can turn to the moon right “now.”

 ***

MICHELLE
Tom and Jesus:  you are beating your head against a wall …. dealing with this guy …. save your breath!

HOGUE
I thank Tom for giving me the opportunity to share these ideas, which have helped frame and clarify the concept of corporate religion. You can all thank Tom and hope that he understands. Equally, you can all hope that “you” understand. I for one do not write with any expectation that any of you will truly understand my meaning. So, I am never disappointed. Some of you like what I write until I find a way of going against your pet opinions. If you all stay reading Hogueprophecy I will eventually strike every hidden nerve of expectation and projection hiding in the programmed mind. When my reader can see beyond opinion, beyond mind at something that is between my lines. That will be a magical moment.

I never expect it to happen so when it often does, I am pleasantly surprised and “great-full”.

 ***

DINAH
My name is Dinah. I wrote this entire piece, in Dec. 2011 (and had posted it on a University listserv for shared political/philosophical ruminations). Your Memorial Day piece made me want to dig it up, and share it again with you:

I’d like to share my own thoughts on belief, God, & religion, [from a previous piece of mine]:

In December 2010, Mother Jones Magazine had an interesting article with the provocative title of “Christians Against Religious Freedom”. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/12/christians-against-religious-freedom   It seems that a group of atheists took out some ads on municipal buses and billboards in Ft. Worth and elsewhere with the following :

“Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.”

Not surprisingly, there were reactions: vandalism to the billboards and posters, an attempted bus boycott, the demand for the city to ban all religious ads, threats, etc.

The question in the ad above IS provocative: it made me wonder: Must a religion always be defined as REQUIRING a God? I am not an atheist but I do consider atheism a fervent BELIEF SYSTEM. Some atheists can be as evangelical as any believer in a Deity. Personally, I’m a semi-secular, culturally and politically progressive non-observant Jewish agnostic with occasional formless Deist, pantheist, or Wiccan inclinations.

HOGUE
Hi Dinah. Usually I do not let people write long comments but I will always make room for good writing and ideas, whatever the length. There are religions that get rid of the personification of God, such as the Jain and the Buddhist variety, but they have their own ways of boxing in followers with beliefs.

I too have encountered Atheists who are often as zealous and evangelical as theists and stuck in their belief systems. It is the same with so-called skeptics. They decide before searching on a conclusion and like believers in God, can always find evidence to support their belief. You will always find what you look for when preconception filters out anything that disproves or counters belief-sets.

The problem is not whether God exists or not, it is the mind and its belief groves cut deep into the broken record of programmed thinking. We would rather believe in something rather than live in a state of no-knowing, because the mind must feed on some thought to survive as master over our silent souls.

If there is a state of understanding beyond the mind, it cannot be understood by a mind. Another way must be found. Or perhaps a better, Zen metaphor would be to say, a way to calm the waters reflecting the moon is needed. Or, an understanding what of how we subconsciously, habitually feed this disturbing of the water surface of the mind to upset and churn and shatter the reflection of the moon into a thousand pieces.

The theory is, by understanding the process, that habit loses momentum and can drop away even. When waters are calm, the reflection of the moon is perfect. Then one can “turn in” to see the source of the reflected moon.

DINAH
My beliefs are fluid and changeable, and I’m not married to them. They float in and out of me like birds flying through open windows.

HOGUE
This is not only a lovely phrase of poetry but it is also my experience when watching beliefs. We have them. The mind cannot live without them. But when one gets some distance from emotions and thoughts by simply watching them with neither a sense of being for or against their being around, something relaxes that makes mind’s drama look like clouds floating by. The sky is always empty and fathomless from where these clouds appear, make their shapes for identity’s sake and finally disappear, appear and play identity’s game and disappear, and so on.

DINAH
Even if I were looking for another religion to join, I hardly know which I would choose. Maybe Unitarian Universalism (actually a fellowship); they don’t have evangelizing zealots knocking at your door.

HOGUE
I choose simply to be “religious” without a corporate address. My fellowship is simply the whole human race. I have no faith in them or in God. I have trust and trust cannot be borrowed like faith. I have no need of God or anti-God worship. I have my existence in the Existence of all. Is it not enough?

Not for the mind, is it enough. That is why I gave my hogue biography the title: An Idiot‘s Autobiography.  The ID, the identity, the illusion of ego creates “John Hogue” yet who am I before there was a “John Hogue” identity to borrow? Who am I after that identity has vanished like all the other billion and one identities in the past, in the future? What in contrast to change can be understood as changless? I put my trust in one question resonating each moment beyond the words, behind the identity, the mind, the body, the emotions and the transitory world surrounding them – are them.

The only question needed to ask without words is: Who am I?

DINAH
Religions are social constructs of (possibly?) shared (but originally private) beliefs. Beliefs don’t morph into religions until they are institutionalized, until peer pressure or dominant personalities force form onto what was once formless. I’m not happy about these available institutions, since they tend to corral people into groupthink, which can stifle, even destroy, the reaching inward/outward for new epiphanies.

HOGUE
This is exactly so.

DINAH
There’s always that middleman (the priest, the Pope, the Rebbe, the Imam) who advises, endorses, interprets, condemns, instructs. They stand between you and the direct experience of [God? the cosmos? nature? the planet? human potential?]. Yet I might strangely find myself happy to open to Big Mom on Mondays, “worship” a tree on Tuesdays, and look for the best in people on Wednesdays. Don’t ask me about the weekend.

HOGUE
The mystery is always watching and constant behind the changing focus of worship.

DINAH
Nonetheless, I think that any of the above-mentioned belief systems, including atheism, should be protected under the First Amendment like any typical religion. And as long as they don’t bother me, I won’t bother them.

HOGUE
Exactly. One must be free to seek inward understanding in any way he or she needs as long as it does not harm others. The golden rule of Buddha the atheist embraced the eternal moment of “Nirvana” (the blowing out of the candle is what Nirvana means). Buddha is the one who coined the golden rule used by Yeshua, who apparently visited Buddhist monasteries during those years lost in the bible accounts.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” easily applies to atheists, theists and those beyond both dichotomies of the search. Let people be who they are and come to their own understanding in their own time. And human law should ever protect that freedom.

DINAH
Then again, being wished “Merry Christmas” for the whole month of December does rankle somewhat every year. I usually think something like, well, I’m Jewish – or am I just Jewish to defend myself against the ubiquitous imposition of ChristCorp Inc – but I suppose I should thank them for including me in their good wishes, even though those wishes create distance rather than connection, because they’d like everyone to be a cookie-cutter Christian, or maybe they’ll wish me Happy Chanukah, but they don’t know I’m a very iffy Jew who started questioning at 10, when Mom couldn’t tell me why we were Chosen, or maybe they’re just hiding their own anxiety behind their wishes, and it all only scratches the surface of the complexity of my spiritual ruminations, and there’s nothing I know about this which feels wholly true.

HOGUE
I also find the holidays phony and corporate ploys. Institutionalized love, be it in the forced buying of Christmas gifts or the contracts we force on love called “marriage”, which really turns lovers into property, chattels… I do not respect them. The future humanity will grow out of these childish things and celebrate every moment in every day. They will love each other free of bondages yet create a society where there is no need for anyone to sell their souls to the bondage of financial security and property arrangements. This new humanity will live by the golden rule of Buddha-Yeshua.

DINAH
But anyway, it can be fun to turn the answers inside out and re-examine the questions. If I were to choose a God worthy of worship, it would be a God of questions, a Great Maker of jigsaw puzzles and infinitely mirrored disco balls, a God who loves a good mystery, a God who is willing to be surprised about what’s coming next, who has let go of control, a God who is everybody’s BFF, a God whose first and most beloved child was IMPERFECTION …

HOGUE
I love the above passage. I think that God-Goddess exists. It is each of us. We are those gods. How else does god become personified in the world if it is not through the work of our hands, the openness of our hearts? If we are blind then God rules his world blind. Can we already see how blind he is using our eyes? Or, how bad are his works built with our robotic, unconscious hands?

I think the Muslim Corp got it wrong. “There is not God but God and Muhammad is his Prophet” is patently incorrect. Consider this change for meditation:

“There is no Godliness but in me, and I am godliness prophet.”

We are all divine mediums pretending not to be because our societies have made us identity ourselves with borrowed identities. We have made mind king and tyrant over our souls. The hammer has become more important than the hand that wields it. A driver who believes he is the car inevitably will run himself into a ditch or off a cliff.

DINAH
Anyway, there IS order in the universe (except for my hair);

HOGUE
Mine too. I have an eternal cowlick coming off the right temple. That is why I wear the knit hats. The secret is out.

DINAH
…we can celebrate that in only 6 short months, it will be summer! I catch myself wanting to join with others, despite my need to stand as far apart as possible from mental and spiritual traps: “Best wishes to all, religion or no religion too, a Happy Merry Blessed SolstiYule-Chrisnukwanzukah, and for all you Seinfeld fans, Happy Festivus!” You see, it’s still hard to resist the need to belong with other people.

HOGUE
We are a family with contrasts. Aloneness cannot exist without togetherness. The art of life is finding the perfect balance between opposites.

DINAH
But if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go by myself to the place where I know nothing, where I don’t HAVE to know anything, and if the other person can be quiet, he/she can sit with me, and we’ll just be some house cats lying stretched out in the sun, breathing in the moment, peaceful.”

HOGUE
This is the way. I will sit with you in my meditations and hear the one hand clapping and the one cat “purring”.

DINAH
P.S. BTW, those “BuddyJesus” and “JesusBalloon” jpg images you included in your piece, Disney action figures that they are, are a scream – and I mean that both ways – terrifying and hysterical.

HOGUE
Buddy Jesus comes from one of my favorite religious satire movies: Dogma. I highly recommend all my readers see it. God ends up being Alanis Morissette with plaid shorts under her dress. You discover this revelation when God is trying to stand on her head and loses her balance. God-morrisette has only one word in the movie: Nieerp!

***

RICHARD
Hi John! I’m always impressed by what you write…..and I read everything that you post when I can. This article you have written is a reflection about how I feel about religion, more specifically, organized religion and the hypocrisy in it. I never associated the word “corporate” with organized religion, but your description is quite apt! I’m not sure John, that the fundamentalists reading your article, will be able to accept what you are conveying here, due to their ingrained belief systems.

HOGUE
Hi Richard, thanks for your kind words about my writing. It is hard for the Toms and the Janes (see my comments below) and Jonathans to see their religious investment as an addiction. There are things so wonderful and incredible waiting for us beyond the dogmatic boxes in which indoctrination has stuffed us concerning what people mistake as “god” or other personifications. Unless a color blinded man or woman can attain to an understanding of color, they cannot conceive what I am saying could be possible in their black-and-white religious lives.

(RICHARD) To underline some of what you wrote, I’d like to insert a portion of a message I sent to someone awhile back….who didn’t bother to respond: >>>Jonathan, are you one that still believes that Jesus died for our sins? That there is a “heaven” and a “hell?” It’s my view that much of what you write is coloured by your religious belief system. I do believe that we’re being visited by ETs. I think that we, as human beings have been influenced by “off world” visitors for more years than I care to number. I also believe that some of these beings are spiritually more advanced than we are and free of the religious dogma that pervades our society. On the flip side, I think that there are other ETs who have a darker agenda……and may be in league with the globalists. A book I’d like to recommend and this is just one of many I have read, is: Reincarnation: The View from Eternity. Written by O.T. Bonnett. You see Jonathan, I believe that religion is a kind of conditioning of the mind, that you yourself, may be victim of. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an atheist…..I do believe in God/The Source/Supreme Universal being and I also believe that there is a spark of God within all of us. For some people, their religion is their anchor. It keeps them grounded and gives meaning to their lives however flawed they may be. I challenge you to read this book I mentioned earlier. If you are unwilling to open your mind to other possibilities you’ll be trapped in your belief system…….and remember, “belief is the thief of reason.

HOGUE
There are many prophecies in the world’s scriptures and prophetic texts that “could” have an extraterrestrial interpretation. I looked at a number of these in Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies. To read an overview of that book click on UFO.

 ***

BILL D.
It has often been in my mind that people are very concerned over being addressed by their correct name and Christian organizations so casually change Yeshua’s name to Jesus. But experience has conditioned me to accept some type of reason behind these actions which only seem to slow down destiny. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense to me that Nostradamas can prophesy the birth of Hister (Hitler) and have it become fact.

HOGUE
The reason why Nostradamus called his Second Antichrist Hister was less an act of changing a name rather than being not completely clear so that Adolf Hitler would not recognize his name and perhaps change his future. Imagine if Nostradamus had said “Hitler” outright and that “Hitler” used his prophecies to win the Second World War rather than lose?

Who would be responsible for this catastrophe?

Nostradamus, of course.

Who wants that karma?

In the end, Nostradamus let too much of Hitler’s name show in the five reverences to “Hister” in his prophecies. We must remember that many Nazis recognized the connection and tried to use these prophecies to seek and find Nazi victory in World War II. You can read more about this fascinating story, which included the Nazi and allied propaganda campaigns using Nostradamus by clicking on Hitler.

BILL D.
Is this intentional blindness part of some higher cosmic energy that utilizes all events to move toward a better way? If the whole universe were total order, it would be stagnation, likewise no order would be chaos.

HOGUE
I do not see this issue in esoteric terms. I see it as a simple issue of human programming. We resist change because we are programmed in every society, to which we are born, to take on the limits of that society.

BILL D.
But I sense the truth in your article. It is high time to shed the shackles of blind faith and use humanity’s total experience to lead us into the Aquarian Age. I hope we don’t require too much pain to awaken our individual Christ natures.

Keep up the good work.
I just completed reading your e-book, Nostradamas and War with Iran. I’m looking forward to your updated version.

HOGUE
If readers want to see an overview of what the updated version of that book will be just click on war with Iran.

***

JULIE
Hi John, Thanks for your constantly informative and direct posts… Which of your publications give lots of info on the true history of Yesuha who became called Jesus?

HOGUE
The book Messiahs covered that. Click on Christ.

JULIE
I keep looking for a complete story which fills in the detail from the apostiles to Constantine to King James and all the other buggers in between. I will be purchasing 2012. Anitichrist and Iran on my next paycheck (after the rent check). I’ve been wanting to get them for a while, but I am just now working a second job after having my income slashed by 25% in October 2011. Thanks again for all you do.

HOGUE
I covered that extensively in the 1998 book: The Last Pope – the Decline and Fall of the Church of Rome.

***

LINN
Well said JOHN!—-you have a ‘divine’ creative flow of words in your ”delivery” to Tom—whom i may say have put him and soooo many other so called ministers of GOD in their place with GODLY truths and hopefully have opened their hearts and minds that GOD is not a selling commodity–but we do have to tithe?–to all who are sincerely teaching His children!—i haven’t read all yet – but i am going back to read the rest—i was just EXCITED to hear the truth finally said regarding the ”spiritual christians”—-many do stop the spiritual growth and bible learning from their teachings which DEFINITELY RETARDS !!! and hold many people captive on a level that seems to them like a ”dead end”==no wonder so many turn from GOD in disbelief—–its a $$$$$$$ org. —-send me 20$ and i’ll tell you the MYSTERIES of heaven??????I JUST WANT TO THANKYOU FOR YOUR REPORT—MANY OF US AGREE….and for all you ”christians” reincarnation —Elijah came back as John the Baptist– remote viewing–levitation –time travelling– the ark was more like the one in the movie 2012–Gen: reveals there were factories in Noah’s time—and more –AND I HAVE THE SCRIPTURES TO PROVE ALL THIS….all of this information is truth and in the bible — thanks again John. also if any of you preachers out there had any of the HOLY SPIRIT in you–you would take JOHN’S REPORT and read it to your congregation…it will enlighten them.

HOGUE
Thank you, Linn. Whether it can be proven or disproven about factories existing in Noah’s time often depends on that ever-subjective way in which the Bible is symbolically written. It reminds me how often some Christian readers take me to task about the nebulous things written by Nostradamus. They ask me why I waste my time picking a phrase here and a verse there to put together invitations. They ask me where I learned to waste time doing this. My answer: I learned if from your Bible and the way you folks pick and choose your interpretations to satisfy a preconceived bias.

Thanks to a study of the subjectivity and mind traps of Bible scholars, I am very careful not to repeat their projections in my interpretation of Nostradamus and other prophecies, including those in their bible.

***

RALPH
John, Thank you for your work at this critical time. Help is on the way. Blessings.

HOGUE
You are welcome, Ralph. The work can sometimes be like cleaning a fish tank. When you bring in a compassionate sludge vacuum, the fishy doo doo in the rocks upon which messiahs build their churches can fly around in the water until things settle. For instance, take note of the next reader, “Jane”:

***

JANE
Shall we worship ourselves or John Hogue? John, Growing up in Hollywood and contact with the Catholic church has really done a number on you!

HOGUE
Thanks for the critical email. Nevertheless, like so many critical letters, they are based on fantasies bouncing around the reader’s head launched by unproven assumptions.

Fact against your fantasy number one: I was born in Hollywood but I did not “grow up” there.

Number two: most of my contact was with Protestant sects, Pentecostals, Baptists and evangelicals – not Catholics. I only got deep into their versions of the Catholic Apocalypse when I wrote my book on the papal prophecies of St. Malachy in my two editions on his work. Check out The Last Pope Revisited.

JANE
If this article was written in love it’s tantamount to changing the meaning of the word love to changing the meaning of marriage to homosexual infatuation.

HOGUE
That is a very odd metaphor (made more odd by the rainbow serpent of light coruscating and unwinding in a huge expanding arch in my right retina from a petite mal migraine I’m enjoying whist writing this.)

Your metaphor, Jane, just hangs out there like a bad phrase whipping about in the wind in public. I think you need to zip that one up and whip something else out there because flying metaphors by the seat of your pants seems a stretch. By the way, marriage is not an act of love. It is an act of commerce, like so many organized religions have corrupted. They have turned love, enlightenment and salvation into business commodities. You can read my essays in Millennium Book of Prophecy about this. Look for them in the sub-section entitled Nuclear Family, Nuclear War. Also check out the Chapter entitled Homo Novus.

You cannot make a business contract on love any more than true religiousness can come from Corpus Christy Corp. And what have you got against gay people loving each other? Most of my gay friends are very kind people. My only concern is that they are now seeking to be as stupid as heterosexuals and want to get into the marriage contract trap.

So, I get you. You hate Homos. OK. And you equate love with marriage property contracts. OK. No problem.

This is not you, Jane. This is just your Christian programming talking under your borrowed name and identity. All of our ideas are borrowed. A few of us seeking wisdom recognize this trap imposed on us and through that understanding attempt to break free of it. I do not fault you for your attitudes, Jane. I could only fault a consciously chosen attitude. I cannot punish a sleepwalker for sleepwalking through life any more than I can fault or punish you, me or others for being spiritually asleep most of our lives. I do enjoy unleashing that fly of consciousness to land on your nose and perhaps disturb your sleep, though. Once that “itch” gets under our sleepy skin, a whole universe unknown to the sleepwalker begins to manifest. That is the “revelation” St. John in his Book of Revelation completely missed.

Actually, your Homo hate stance is something my gay friends ought to face because your hate “is” God’s hate. It is quite clear in the scriptures of the Old and New Testament that the people who wrote that book in the name of God do definitely “hate fags”.

In fact, the term “fag” comes from medieval Christians burning gay people like cordwood during one of their many persecutions of non-believers. They used to toss homosexuals like “fags” of wood to the bonfire fire. (You have such a loving religion, Jane.)

And to my Gay friends, why in hellfire and brimstone are you worshipping this homo-hating religion? Do you not know that what happened to gay people in the medieval times could happen again?

You can love Jesus without being a part of this religion that hates and misunderstands you. Maybe you can form a new Christian sect, call it “Gay Christianity.” That has a nice and welcoming, happy, sound to it.

JANE
Of course we are in the business lately of changing the meaning of words. In short the Devil is having his day but it will not last long.

HOGUE
Chuckle… The dogmatic mind has always been saying that for 2,000 years now. When such an ugly and sanctimonious mind playing you’ll get yours doesn’t get a judgment day, day after foretold day, century after foretold century, millennium after foretold millennium, that brain-dirtied mind rifles and pulls out any excuse in its “Ratzinger-bag” of Sunday School refuse to explain it away.

No prophecy tradition in history has been so consistently and patently silly than the Christian tradition when it comes to setting up doomsdays that never pan out.

JANE
Fortunately your disbelief in our savior Jesus Christ or Yeshua does not make it true. Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ soon and even if you turn red green and purple when that happens if you are alive your tongue will confess that he is real and he is our God.

HOGUE
Speaking of red, green and purple, you sound like you’ve drank that Kool-Aid of cult. Bronx cheer raspberry “red”, lime “green” and gaping grape “purple.”

As the song goes, “Koolaid-Koolaid, tastes great…”

The only cult I like to be a member of is the garlic cult. When everyone in my cult eats my spaghetti sauce, we all smell sweet. Our garlicy faith does not “stink”.

Me “Tarzan”. You…

JANE
You John are his spirit child like all of us so quit spitting in is face and be grateful for all that he has given you instead of spreading this 1950s idea that” God is dead”. Dead indeed is that idea fostered by intellectuals and artists of that period of time . Jane

HOGUE
God is not dead. You have to be real to die. God as an imaginary friend, bought and sold as a marketing product by big business religion never was real. I deal with spiritual realities, not imaginary friends.

***

ROBERT D.
Well done. A clearly expressed exposition on the falsity of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. The soul’s journey is concerned with inner reflection, supercedes any dogma, is only concerned with the now. The soul has existed before the dawn of man, and will continue when this earth, and all its thoughts/experience are no more.

HOGUE
Thank you, Robert.

***

TOM
Revelation about the book of revelation. apparently you haven’t read it recently. If you do you will see that it really is about RIGHT NOW. 

HOGUE
God in heaven, Tom! Learn how to spell, punctuate and capitalize. I had to correct enough of this letter so people could read your rant about “Is-real”, etc. Your letter was such a mess that it made you look like some redneck functional illiterate. Shame on you for presenting your argument in such a sloppy and disempowering fashion. You can do better than this otherwise you are feeding stereotypes of bible bashers who never finished High School in the Bible Belt.

Now, if there is any parallel to the prophecies in Revelation to our time it is because it is written in such a vague and psychotic prophetic language that people have been pinning it to a number of times before popularly pinning it to our own. Secondly, as I stated earlier in blogs such as St. John of Revelation was a Psycho, the cornerstone of this very bad Christian rehash of the Book of Daniel – an authentic book of prophecy – puts a Christian eschatological (sorry for the big word) spin on it, plus, it makes quite clear that Emperor Nero was the Beast of 666.

Have you ever heard of the Christian  Preterist  movement, Tom? They make a very good argument that the Book of Daniel and Revelation cover fulfilled events in the First Century AD, and have nothing to do with our future.

In a chapter for Messiahs entitled From Propheganda to Armageddonomics (Brainwashed to make Doomsday Happen), I proposed that many of the misinterpretations you list below could happen because of 2,000 years of brainwashing Christians to subconsciously “make” them happen. The end result would not be a return of Jesus Christ, or your ascent into the clouds in a Rapture event.

I will give my readers the opportunity to waste their time swimming through your bad grammar and syntax and your rude and crude sentences, if they like. For me, your letter is a typical example of many I get from poorly educated people who seem to flock to this fundamentalist doomsday cult stuff.

TOM
Your Mabus is fingered before 13-13 and you should know 13- 13 perfectly describes the 911 event. rev 15-2 ia another current event which i shouldn’t have to spoon feed anyone. Revelation 16-2: the Eupharties river will dry up to make way for the kings of the east. well it is either dried up now or what level of dryness is needed? Lastly revelation is three parts. WW1, WW2 and final jeopardy. what’s ww1 about? as a result of Germany’s defeat and resulting economic depression, Hitler was able to rise. ww2 we get the holocaust. thus in 1948 as a direct result of Hitler he have the reincarnation if Israel. as a result of Israel we have this present day Mexican standoff with Iran. this chain is perfect. return to 16-12 and see what little remains. what i see from many of the readers is they are lost swimming in great sea of BS this has been created by at least mommy daddy school teachers Hollywood the press TV and many other sources of questionable wisdom. thus they know not what to believe and they believe nothing aka Atheisism. think for your self. you and god is a direct relationship. myself and others accept the living christian god and the living word of the living god, the bible. thank for this opportunity.

 

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