Riffin' On The Prophecy of the Fall of the Temple of Jerusalem

“(23) Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

Behold, I have told you before.

Wherefore if the shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not. For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

(28) For wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.” Matthew 24: 23-28

I believe that it was the Buddha who is credited as adamantly expressing, “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

While an undeniably wise way to live your life, reflected within the notion is the entire Buddhist cosmology (which is true of all factual/true statements within the Buddhist cosmology; if something is effectively “true” then as a vehicle it’s a reliable house for Infinity…the potential inferences of a single factual statement never end, and forget 6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, you eventually can’t help but to realize that you are Kevin Bacon…and there are only about 6 degrees of separation between you and him in the social world, but virtually only one, or none, via the transcendental routes…). You see, the Buddhists are very John 14…they think that the human body comes with feedback loops that are lovingly provided so that we can spiritually actualize/achieve communion with the Source of Life. So, in this system, if someone has a strong sensation of distrust towards a teaching another individual provides… you better investigate that situation!

At the very least, it conveys where the individual is at in their understanding of what is being presented to them. Sometimes, why they feel what the teacher is teaching is wrong is because they haven’t fully understood the lesson, thus far, as it was intended to be understood…they got mixed up somewhere along the way, and when they vocalize their confusion to the teacher, this invites an opportunity for the teacher to get that individual back on track.

At other times, it’s the spark of ingenuity. Sometimes the teacher is working with a source material and believes that they have a mastery over it, but in fact the elephant in the room would like to develop their skillsets further. This is the miracle of the spiritual community…the parish/Sangha. The priests/prayer leaders gather just as much as the people they are helping to instruct.

This is the specialness of the situation that is the Christ…the specialness of Jesus Christ as Man and a savior…the salvation He offers is comprehensive and has been since the beginning of time. “For as lightning” “cometh out of the East” (this is not referencing Oriental vs Western religion at all) it “shineth even unto the West”… we are living under the constraints of Salvation and always have been…if your gut tells you to not trust a statement any one makes, secular or otherwise, it helps to know that the J-man himself, the Jesus Christ, is that feeling in your gut [still doesn’t mean that you’re right, but listening to your body will move you forward as a person]…is the Source of that feeling, at the same time. It was an invention of a brain identical to yours in capabilities, a human brain, and you get it, right? We all get it…we’re not dumb.

Christ is life. Life is Chirst. This is a bit like scaring young children with the idea of monsters… it turns out that there aren’t any vampires or werewolves…no demons…no Hell…no eternal separation from God… to live a life is to wake up in a construct the SAVIOR OF THIS MATERIAL UNIVERSE/ THE MOST IMPORTANT CELEBRITY EVER personally created just for you, and there’s no way to screw it up in regards to eternal prospects, but you could like end up getting into meth and having really bad teeth so it’s not like we can entirely rest on our laurels here…

We have here (in spiritual communities (the parish and the Sangha) a system of skillsets combined with a system of mysticism…we need to both know how to act, in addition to needing to know how to both listen, as well as be utterly lost (effectively/gracefully). We need to both know how to do it all, as well as effectively respond to the situation where we can hardly tell our face from our very hands, the situation in which to be able to do it all/be in control is an absurd notion.

I honestly believe the Bible passage here, spoken by Christ, goes so far as to claim that it isn’t even possible for false conceptions of Christ to pose a social threat. This is important (Christ was killed for corrupting the children, ultimately). “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.”

Chris is apparently so powerful, that he can and does counterbalance every misinterpretation performed in his name. But we know this, we’ve been talking about it today…that feeling in your gut…

The next time someone interprets dwindling attendance numbers at Mass as being the product of the times, interpreting the times as particularly heathenistic or hopelessly secular in the process, I am going to explode. The single most powerful force in the Cosmos is the subject matter of the Sunday Mass… there are no other forces that hijack the world (illness/disease and the such…they are a subset of this Supreme force). The world isn’t secular…the times aren’t agnostic or atheistic…God has too much control/power/love for that. The only force driving the Cosmos at any given moment is Love, incarnate.

For so wherever the carcass is, the eagles will be gathered… and you come after me, as an individual, over notions of mass attendance? I could fix the situation if you ever effectively worked with me…I’ve given you the best teachings and tools imaginable by which you guys could address that issue. But like, we need a man of God to say publicly…where does youtube fit in? It wasn’t there 15 years ago… are people getting into super good stuff, but not necessarily showing at Sunday at 9 in the same ways they used to? I just don’t understand how we see the internet prosper and also don’t see the parish impacted, speaking as a sort of cultural anthropologist…

I noticed that these hippie music festivals are immensely popular these days…

I need to zoom out and address more of Christ’s speech in Matthew 24 here. I have heard it in the past, and I’ve only ever heard it wildly misinterpreted. I have seen in this chapter of the New Testament a prediction on behalf of Christ that reads eerily similar to a synopsis of world history since the historical man spoke those very words as they were leaving the temple in Jerusalem. Historians have been noting that Christ successfully prophesized the eventual fall of the Temple of Jerusalem where he is teaching these very words as Him and his disciples were leaving Jerusalem that day, but what Christ says in Matthew 24 is figurative, and seems to be addressing the stages of civilization as much as they are specific events at a specific temple. He was starting to glimpse the period of time in which people were no longer Romans or Carthaginians or Americans or Native Americans…but people.

He seems to be speaking of the inevitable shedding of the aspects of identity that are rooted in things which divide…such as the nation state really can if you don’t make yourself a man of God before you make yourself a man of country… he’s capturing that there will come a time where the social authorities actually desire you serving Self over them, and in the subtext there is the notion that we will all become one human family, that peace will be sustainable, and that civilization will have meaningfully evolved to be far more…holy, and pleasing to the source of Life itself.

So I will revisit soon. And do a decent job of it, instead of merely throwing it together last minute (probably high on hash oil like one of those Shiva temple weirdos).

For disclosure’s sake, I had done my patented wall throw technique with the Bhagavad Gita before drawing this quote from a random Bible verse generator, and there was an immense amount of crossover between my Gita quotes and the passages I ended up drawing from Matthew 24. I’ll also do a blog entry on those Gita quotes at some time; in the shorthand, the passages I found seem to indicate that the Universal form, which is a hyperbolic mirrored performance of simple…existence…the world surrounding us right now… was exclusively shown to Arjuna, that no one had seen it before that moment. It implies that while one can become enlightened by studying anything at all, not a single person ever has without God emanating personally and engaging the Individual at the onset of “the path” (this eventually amounts to the path). It implies the absolute necessity of Christ, the historical man, in addition to the spiritual teacher…the priest or monk or whatnot. Coming soon!

Just so you guys know, Siddhartha...Sid-Harth...Acid-Immaculate Heart