KEEPING THE FAITH

A few posts back I referred to the Celestine Prophecy and its elucidation of nine insights about the possible evolution of mankind towards conscious symbiosis with the rest of the body of which we have always been a natural part. Running back into its message at this point in my life seems to resonate more completely through my experience than my original reading of it fifteen years ago. So much so that I decided to examine the idea of prophecy in light of being aware of so many potential crises seeming to be peaking at the not too far future. Everyone is being forced into the role of prophet in sizing up how much things beyond their control are in control of their fate. The big, out of your comfort zone picture.

The skill of projecting the actions taken in the past and contemplated in the present to be the cause of specific results in the future is as essential to the continuance of individual life as food and water. The definition of sanity in nature is the ability to adapt to its constant change, for which predicting the inevitability of results accumulating in ones present is primary tool. This skill grows with experience of history repeating itself until one gets the nature of the story no matter what it is about. Such wisdom may be gained at any critical mass of seeing the patterns, the weave, the way, the theme behind the way things happen. I would venture to say that such epiphanies occur to everyone by the age of thirty-five. What individuals perceive those times to mean and what they do in their lives as a result is as varied as they are unique.

We call people expressing their predictions from sandwich boards, soap boxes and scripture pages, prophets. The wisest, bravest most experienced in primitive tribal life was the seer, the shaman, the priest — all based on their skill at prophecy and their followers’ reliance on its truth. In consulting the dictionary I found that prophecy is a noun, and since 1700, different than the ability to speak prophecy by the spelling of the verb as prophesy. So the prophet sees then he sighs. But nowhere did I come across the sense of prophecy I got from the Celestine Prophecy. Thesaurus came up with forecast, divination, fortune telling, crystal-gazing, prediction, second sight, prognostication, augury, soothsaying —— all either drug or trance induced or revelatory observations of things natural or caused by but beyond control of mankind —— and I still hadn’t gotten the sense of the prophet being a wise planner, recruiting adherents and shaping a way of life by which the community members kept faith in the original plan by sticking to its original fire, its inspiring ethos, through generations of social and technological change. I know wonderfully skilled artists and scholars who match my joy in seeing one another and sharing our time together catching up on the state of our old hippie values and resettling the world’s problems and who, upon parting, say to one another some version of, “Keep the faith” or "may the circle be unbroken," with our own separate, unique ways to do our part for our planet. We are earthlings before being human, sex, race or nationality and the unspoken prophecy of nature seems to be a long lost plan for such a primary reconnection.