January 17, 2011
Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday
If Dr. King were alive today, he would shudder at what his nation has become four decades after his death—especially in view of the new forms of violence, self-deception, and even nihilism in which America is steeped. That’s why, as we celebrate King’s birth today in the year 2011, we need to look for a new Martin Luther King to carry the torch of the modern revolution of conscience that King initiated.
A look at the lineage of the Hebrew prophets shows that one isolated prophet can never be enough to correct an errant and lawless civilization. As a result, the message of these ancient prophets evolved and deepened to meet the rising challenge. And after the last prophet was forgotten or encrusted in idolatry—as Dr. King’s image is today—a fresh new teacher rose up out of nowhere to build on previous scripture and to speak to his generation’s experience with oppression and injustice. Of course, Dr. King believed this lineage culminated in Jesus himself. In the same manner, a post-modern or “integral” prophet will speak truth to power in a new way, yet will participate in King’s lineage; indeed, our prophets must evolve as our civilization evolves.
America reached a spiritual zenith in the oratory and compassionate action of King that led to the successes of civil rights movement and other movements for liberation; but King’s America hit bottom in the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq in 2003. A new prophet for our time would point to our complicity in this war crime. He or she would rail against the entire panoply of senseless wars we have pursued since 9/11—crying out about how little we have learned.
Such a prophet would also direct us to 9/11 itself, the monstrous elephant in America’s moral living room. He would harken to the proof that we have been cruelly deceived about what happened on that day. She would call for a new, independent investigation; for even more whistleblowers to come forth; for Americans to grow up and educate themselves about 9/11 truth before it’s too late.
Expanding the scope of scrutiny, a twenty-first century prophet would direct us to the spiraling growth of the covert violence of the “deep state,” as author Peter Dale Scott calls it. These techniques have evolved beyond what we now know about the assassinations and the war crimes of the Vietnam era. They have advanced unimaginably far in sophistication from the awkward COINTELPRO tactics of that era to which King and thousands of activists were illegally subjected. Today such tactics include the NSA’s ultra-high tech surveillance of millions of citizen’s phone calls and email. They include the shredding of key provision of our Bill of Rights in the name of an endless War on Terror, and they extend to rogue quasi-governmental hit squads that deploy weapons of mass coercion and other mind control weapons on citizens (as discussed in one of my earlier blog posts).
Along the same line, this prophet for our time would point to the madnessof having 854,000 people—nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C.—holding top-secret security clearances. In its article of July 19 of last year, The Washington Post called the phenomenon “a Top Secret America hidden from public view” and funded by a $75 billion budget. Our penchant for secrecy is indeed a disturbing sight, morally and spiritually: “Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence,” said the Post, “in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”
A prophet in 2011, like King in 1968, would still quote the Old Testament prophets who warned Israel of the dire harvest to come from its Godless ways. But in 2011 and 2012 updated methods of prophetic utterance would translate these archaic passages into today’s more complex theological and ethical concepts, as did King. Such language even today sits in the hearts of many who are even now ready to rise up for justice, love, and mercy in the economic, social, and political spheres.
King always emphasized how utterly pointless and counterproductive violence is—even in terms of the instrumental goals of the perpetrator. Our new prophet would chasten our country for its decades of continued descent into self-destructive militarism since King’s time, as it spent itself into oblivion with military and intelligence budgets vastly beyond reason.
Like King and the prophets of old, a post-modern prophet would take up the particulars of the day—such as our nonsensical drone attacks in and around Pakistan. They might point to the fact that counterproductive drone-attack war crimes peppered all the dates of the January calendar around Jared Loughner’s nihilistic gun attack in Tuscon.
Yet, did anyone in the mainstream media note the scary parallel of these two phenomena? A U.S. drone rained death from the sky in a tribal area of Pakistan just four days after the events in Tuscon killed four alleged militants. This was the fifth strike this year following a total of 111 in 2010—all inside a country with which the US is not at war. According to the UK’s Guardian on December 28, 2010, “The Brookings Institute has calculated a civilian-to-militant kill ratio of 10:1 [from US drone attacks] . . . Meanwhile, figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities suggest US strikes killed 701 people between January 2006 and April 2009, of which 14 were al-Qaida militants and 687 were civilians, for a much higher ratio. That produces a hit rate of just 2% – or 50 civilians dead for every militant killed.”
The drone attacks are circus of irrationality. Even General David Petraeus himself is quoted in the Guardian article as saying that “…recruits for a militant movement [have] grown exponentially as drone strikes have increased.” This methodology, pursued by President Obama with even more passion than Bush before him, is what might be called state nihilism.
Obama was, of course, a false prophet. A true prophet for our time would update King’s nonviolence philosophy while still denouncing the more obvious manifestations of overt warfare. He or she would point to the more subtle “structural violence” and “spiritual violence” that is built into today’s social structures on a worldwide scale, ideas that Dr. King began to glimpse. As philosopher Glen Martin points out in his prophetic text Millenium Dawn: The Philosophy of Planetary Crisis and Human Liberation, the accumulation of capital in a few hands—vastly increased since King’s time—would not be possible without subtle forms of organized violence toward the human mind as well as the natural world. Such violations of human and natural rights are constituted and upheld by ideologies, education, propaganda, and communication media that ultimately serve naked power. They purvey deceptions and lies that will in turn require new forms of nonviolent resistance, compassionate action that is redemptive for the new types of perpetrators and victims we witness today.
King’s nonviolent philosophy of brotherly love supported by the watch care of a compassionate God builds upon that of Gandhi and others, and this same philosophy needs to underlie today’s growing movement of resistance to deep state violence and global structures of injustice. As discussed elsewhere in this blog, King was assassinated by agents of the deep state before his Poor People’s Campaign could gain traction. Among its goals was to raise nonviolence to a new level so as to pressure Congress into passing an Economic Bill of Rights for the nation’s poor. With the ongoing immisseration of the middle class in this country and overseas, a new campaign—inclusive of the global poor and working class—is needed that builds upon the lessons of the past.
A new prophet would quote these words of King about violence and again warn us that we have not learned from them: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate . . . Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
King also said: “It seems to me that I can hear God saying to America—you are too arrogant! If you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I am God.”
A new prophet—indeed thousands of post-modern, grassroots prophets—will realize that King was right: America’s backbone has been broken. The focus of evil today is not simply United States foreign policy or domestic abuses, but a criminalized global elite whose backbone will also be broken by its own myopia, selfishness, and nihilism.
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What prohpet(s) will speak for the state defined by compassion, whose highways are lanes of mercy and whose citizens trade in the currency of love? Aren’t the states of this world but shadows of real governance where everlasting power is seated in the hearts of human beings who love truth and work for justice?
What a shame that we, like so many nations before us continue to lurch forwards towards collapse, seemingly oblivious to past history. Perhaps it is less mysterious given the material profits that the small number of controllers make, themselves apparently unaware of the severe damage that they are doing to their own souls, perhaps even unaware that they will survive the death of their bodies. New awareness of such matters may be what is required before a prophet will be able to make an important difference.
Alternatively, the prophet that will deliver us is in EVERY person, a globally shared identity, rather than one key figure or another. It seems that the most profound work now is done by the most humble—those who help feed the homeless, those who put their lives on the line to STOP violence rather than simply do violent military duty (under a criminal state regime), those who work to end ignorance and unite all peoples, rather than those who call for violence against those who doubt old, Bronze Age dictates.
There’s one phenomenal irony, at the moment. By definition, a prophet is one who sees the future, a visionary. Now, with our post-Roswell, post-quantum science, anyone can do a kind of telepathic and remote viewing. Indeed, if hundreds of whistleblowers are correct, there are a huge number of advanced “alien” societies (they literally use that word) all around us, all of which are reportedly equalitarian, almost universally non-violent, and sharing. More importantly, they and their science point to a phenomenal way that the universe somehow cycles back into itself. In other words, the edge of the universe isn’t 13.7 million light years away. Instead, it’s defined by a strangely, non-local smeared out kind of event horizon that we see in every atom’s deeper nucleus, in gravity and the (ever-condensing) inward pull of stars’ fusion (the very origin of that “light” that surrounds us), and in so-called “black holes.”
Weird as it may sound, scientists actually do experiments in which a light signal is sent into a vacuum chamber containing a gaseous metal plasma, which causes the light to somehow speed up to 300X light speed. The weird part of that is that by going faster than light, the impulse goes into the vacuum chamber than returns back to the point of origin of the light signal BEFORE it even enters the chamber. Think about that for a moment. Scientists call this an “advanced wave” or a fractional wave. The same thing happens in so-called “two-slit” experiments.
And that weird new kind of “advanced wave” science shows that any remote viewer can actually, conceivably, remotely view the future. If you parked your mind back in 20th century science you might say, “No way!” Yet experiments point to precisely such phenomena. Even quantum physics, the mainstream science model, points to a holographic quality in which one distant part of the universe can almost immediately yet faintly tease out what has happened or is happening in a light-years distant part of the universe. In other words, as I noted above, both the universe AND a new kind of time, itself, actually cycles back into itself all around us. The only way to make sense of that is to feel for it in a slightly more faded yet expanded awareness of your surroundings and beyond. It’s called remote viewing, and the US government has trained many how to do it–so it must have a basis. There are alternative civilian methods for doing so, in abundance.
But if we now have an essentially built-in ability in our very mind/brain structure that allows us to remotely sense such time and or places, then that allows us to be in nearly instant touch with far distant locations and a new kind of time connecting the universe. It’s an essentially folded kind of space-time, and researchers suggest that it’s all around us, all the time. And that points to the human ability to share thought and awareness in a greatly expanded kind of community of mind, which those reported “aliens” are said to say that they do, given their “advanced” kind of science.
So, a new kind of transparency is open to us all. And a slightly deeper kind of connectedness means that a subtle yet indelible record of any thought, any deed, and any crime is embedded in the universe for the rest of time (like a hologram quality). Which means that no mass criminal, no regime psychotic can violate us without leaving readily accessible evidence in the space-time, atomic structures all around us. Remote viewers easily sort through such traces in an instant. And here’s the final irony: until and unless you commit to and essentially define yourself in terms of that new, “advanced wave” kind of interaction, you may remain doubtful of it all. It’s not really a leap of faith; it’s just a simple yet phenomenal opening, and expanding of your mind into such science and connectedness.
You become the prophet. And we all then share a phenomenally universal new kind of capacity–we particapate in and are responsible for an ultimate awareness. It’s very real.
Let there be many new co-arising leader-prophets following in the tradition of MLK, who will integratively express the will of love within the One, and all, facilitating true planetary progress in harmony and synchrony with the rest of the universe!
It’s good to see you pick up the pen again, Byron. “Mightier than the sword,” I think somebody once said. Regarding prophets in the Rev. King tradition, I think your points are painful to consider, but right on the mark. After Viet Nam many activists thought that America was back on a better track. Obviously, we were very wrong. Your points about deep politics and the new complexities which darken the world are written with great eloquence and insight. You seem to be telling us that we need to move to the same moral and spiritual high ground as Dr. King, but like King, stay tuned to the evils which eat away at the good and decent people of Earth. What a challenge: Face honestly and openly the horrible truths destroying our world, yet keep love in our heart and save the world!
Yes, the spiritized WE is the new singular MLK. Would you like to take a next possible step? Call me to discuss, at 561-460-3168. I look forward to helping you access answers to your questions through our Indwelling Spirits.
Byron, This is a wonderful article ! As you know I have worked thousands of hours for the Peace movement in Oklahoma. The trouble that we are experiencing is that people are frightened and not willing to give up their comfy survival to stick their neck out and protest peacefully. I do agree with Dennis Briefer that people are basically caught up in their own mortality and not understanding that life is eternal. I would like Dennis to know that there are people working diligently on this in the scientific community. People have lost their faith in dogmatic religions and are leaning more towards a scientific or technical explanantion of our reality.
I also must comment on George Lobuono’s post pertaining to remote viewing. As a remote viewer I can tell you that I personally have documented is that the future is not in a fixed position. I feel that what we can view in real time and the future is 99.9% accurate leaving a small percentage to chance. The past time viewing process appears to be fixed. This is why “prophets ” have a hard time being 100% accurate but Historians tend to screw things up a little too. There is always that cow that kicks over a lantern or some other ball from left field that sets in motion a different outcome. Personally, I love the mystery. On a positive note some odd iota of chance may happen and spur someone to take the mantle and lead us to the peaceful loving existance we yearn for.
Lastly, I do pray that a new prophet [He or She]for peace appears on the horizon burning with the vision of Dr Martin Luther King. Thanks again Byron for your passionate words that inspire us.