Author: abracad

When The End Time Starts Will It End Positively?

Rabbi Allen S. Maller

A decade ago (May 2, 2012) a Reuters Poll reported that “nearly 15 percent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime. “Whether they think it will come to an end through the hands of God, or a natural disaster or a political event, whatever the reason, one in seven thinks the end of the world is coming,” said Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos Global Public Affairs which conducted the poll for Reuters. Among Evangelical Christians three out of four felt we are living in the End Times of Gog and Magog; Ya’juj and Ma’juj End Times (AKHIR AL-ZAMAN) for Muslims.

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Escaping the Military: Healing the Virus of Violence

From the book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War

By William T. Hathaway

RADICAL PEACE presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists who are working to change our warrior culture. A young Buddhist novice contributed this account, which we then revised together. To protect the people who have protected him, he prefers to be nameless.

Back in high school I’d been good at languages but couldn’t afford to go to college, so I joined the navy for the language training. They have a program where if you pass an aptitude test, they’ll send you to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for an intensive course that’s worth almost a year of college credit. Plus they have an active-duty education program that offers college courses. I figured after my discharge I could finish my education on the GI Bill, and with my language skills, I could get a job in international business.

The other military branches offer programs like this too, but the navy seemed the best way to stay out of the fighting. I was hoping for a major language like Chinese, Russian, or Spanish, but they assigned me to Pashto, which is spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After training, I’d be stationed on a ship in the Arabian Sea monitoring phone calls and radio broadcasts, listening for key words that might give a clue about where the Taliban were, so the planes from the aircraft carriers could bomb them. I didn’t think about this last part, though. I was focused on my future. (more…)
Coming Home

From the book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War

By William T. Hathaway

RADICAL PEACE is a collection of reports from antiwar activists, the true stories of their efforts to change our warrior culture. In this chapter a mother tells of her son’s return from combat.

My son spent a year fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq in Delta Force. It was the worst year of his life … and of mine. As he told me later, there were times he thought he’d never come home. That was also my constant fear. For 365 days, every time the phone rang I thought it would be a voice from the Pentagon telling me with well-practiced condolence that my son had died a hero. (more…)
Is lasting peace possible?

By William T. Hathaway

The wise men of the establishment are again telling us that hopes for lasting peace are a delusion. They declare that human nature makes it impossible, that war is built into our genes. They point to research by evolutionary biologists that indicates our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, make war. Therefore war must be part of our heredity.

“We’ve always had wars,” they claim. “Humans are a warring species. Without a military to defend us, someone will always try to conquer us.” These assumptions have become axioms of our culture. They generate despair but also a certain comfort because they relieve us of the responsibility to change. (more…)
Report from Germany: Refugees Welcome – Sometimes

By William T. Hathaway

Posted on streetlamps all over Germany are stickers showing fleeing silhouettes with the caption, “Refugees welcome – bring your families”. Some have been blacked out with felt markers or ripped partially away. The Germans have mixed feelings about refugees, as demonstrated in the earlier waves from the Mideast and the current one from the Ukraine.

copyright-free image from https://openclipart.org/detail/201971/refugees-welcome-bring-your-families (more…)
Goddess power to the rescue

By William T. Hathaway

Humanity is now in disaster mode, trapped in three double binds: a choice between war or national decline if we don’t fight, between climate catastrophe or economic collapse if we make changes, between COVID 19 or drastic measures that are supposed to stop it. Threats surround us; chaos and confusion reign on all levels.

Such extraordinary constellations of trauma indicate that massive stress is clogging the collective consciousness of humanity. In the ancient Vedic tradition purging this stress, or karma, is called killing the demon. (more…)
Consciousness is all there is

By William T. Hathaway

As Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you know for sure but which just isn’t true.”

Humanity is now in trouble because its fundamental assumption about the nature of the universe just isn’t true. The materialist worldview that has dominated science and philosophy for the past 200 years has crumbled. Discoveries in quantum physics have disproven it, but no consensus has been able to take its place. Materialists and idealists have been arguing back and forth for decades.

This lack of shared understanding has repercussions that go beyond the laboratory. Without a consistent, agreed-upon worldview, societies don’t function well. As cognitive confusion spreads, our common basis for problem solving weakens. (more…)
Privatizing Nature

By William T. Hathaway

The financial wizards of Wall Street have devised a new way to profit from Mother Nature. They’ve created a class of stocks called Natural Asset Companies that will control the earth’s resources such as water, wildlife, forests, minerals, and farmland. The project was developed by the Intrinsic Exchange Group in partnership with the New York Stock Exchange, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the investment firm Aberdare Ventures. (more…)
Jesus’s Wife? Scholar Announces Existence of a New Early Christian Gospel from Egypt

Rabbi Allen S. Maller

Four words written in Coptic, a language of ancient Egyptian Christians, appear on a fragment of about one and a half inches by three inches. and translate to, “Jesus said to them, my wife…”. This is the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen King told the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies hosted in 2012 by the Vatican’s Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome.

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The Real Vaccine

By William T. Hathaway
Our world now writhes like a wounded worm, helpless
to escape its torment, blind
to the cause but blaming
a bug: “Stop it, stomp it, strangle it!
Too late – inside us, breeding into billions of bugs!
Kill them, poison them!
But our poisons don’t work – oh no!
Swarming with new bugs! Hopeless! Dying!”
All the while Shiva whispers:
“Beneath your terror and turmoil lies the tranquility of the transcendent.
You’re trapped on the surface mind, tossed by the waves.
Now dive to the depths and merge with me.
In my bigness a bit of bugness won’t panic you.
You’ll gain immunity to the insanity.
Come on down, look around,
here is where your Self is found.”

Shiva, Lord of Transcendence

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The author of eight books, William T. Hathaway was a Fulbright professor of
creative writing at universities in Germany, where he currently writes, meditates,
and hangs out with Shiva. If you’d like to contact Shiva and enrich your life with
his presence, this website will show you how, all for free:
https://meetshiva985866381.wordpress.com/.