It’s All An Elaborate Hoax…

Photo by Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash.

Reflection given at the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, February 7, 2014.

The last time I caught myself in serious reflection was over the New Year period. I had been invited to share my wishes for 2014 with a group of friends. Unfortunately, I could not attend the event but I did chose to spend some time answering that question.

But the longer I brooded the more the answer, or image, became that of a fairytale. And the fairytale was of Sleeping Beauty as I asked, most of all, when are we going to wake-up?

For it was over the New Year period that we learned, at least from one worldly expert, that the civil war in Syria in which well over 100,000 mainly civilians have already been killed – let’s say murdered – could go on for another 10 years! While at the same time we also learned that in 2013 another 9,000 people – again, almost entirely civilians – had been murdered in Iraq; a country where we were supposed to have sorted everything out. And I ask myself: Who is doing this? And why are we doing this?

Meanwhile, in South Sudan, we learned of another civil war threatening to take root so soon in the world’s youngest country, while in Central Africa Muslims and Christians were once again killing each other with fresh abandon; when all of these horrific crises – as we know only too well – displace millions of people from their homeland with millions more on the brink of starvation caused by the disruption of war, while many, many millions more in countries around the world struggle each day to make their own ends meet.

So, again, the question which kept surfacing in my mind is ‘When will this end, when will we wake up and see how we are living on this beautiful planet?’ While the BBC reported record numbers of the youth in Britain feeling a sense of utter despair, despondency and suicide seeing no hope, no purpose, in any kind of future; numbers we can suspect that are replicated around the world.

And the youth are not alone. Figures also put out by the BBC indicate that the number of people in Europe – and again we might at least include the United States and the Western World – living on anti-depressants has risen from between a staggering 500 – 1000% over the past 20 years.

Our world is in horrific crisis, a perfect storm, to make no mention of the environmental challenges we face, or the nightmare scenario that could so easily unfold at Fukushima as technicians attempt the unprecedented and extremely delicate and dangerous task of removing more than 1,000 fresh and irradiated fuel rods from the ruptured Unit 4 at Daiichi, taking several years in the process – barring any other potential accident before the plant can be fully decommissioned, hopefully, before this century is out.

And what of the thousands of migratory birds dead and dying on Midway Island because their stomachs are filled not with fish but with plastic, or the destruction and even extinction of so much else of our natural reserves and the life which they have harbored for thousands, even possibly millions of years?

So when I ask when are we going to awaken from this virtual nightmare upon our world into a much more conscious, intelligent, compassionate race of humans no longer attached to such limited, even ridiculous, notions of possession or nationalism, or any other ideology of separation, cognizant of each of our essential needs and the sacredness of all life and of the planet upon which we reside – this “insignificant planet of a humdrum star tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Universe in which there are far more galaxies than people”, so described by astronomer Carl Sagan, I can find no better answer than that given by, of all people, the late movie critic, Roger Ebert, the day before he died.

As his widow, Chaz, recalls: “The one thing people might be surprised about – Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.” I asked him, “What’s a hoax?” And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn’t visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can’t even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once.”

Beyond attaining this greater vision, this more universal concept, I see little to no hope for humanity. We will continue in our small-minded earthbound ways, dismissive of a grander notion to be anything other than what we appear. But it is a concept to which I increasingly subscribe, and indeed, through my affiliation to the cosmic philosophy of The Aetherius Society have now done so for almost 30 years. And it is through the founder of this spiritual and metaphysical organization while in a deep, yogic samadhic trance almost exactly 53 years ago in this very city of Los Angeles, that an intelligence from beyond this Earth – from that dimension as so beautifully glimpsed by Roger Ebert as he lay dying – revealed, that “When terrestrial man begins to realize his true position in the Cosmos, he must then begin to manifest this great energy of Love.”

Nothing more, I am convinced, than such an understanding of ourselves in this much broader, Cosmic, context and a corresponding radical shift in our culture to embrace this larger reality, can sufficiently disturb us from our sleep and awaken us from the virtual nightmare we have created.