At the End of Time: Prophecy and Revelation: A Spiritual Paradigm

By Robin Robertson

Many cycles predicting the “end of times” fill our modern dialog--from the coming of the Millennium to 2012. Robin Robertson helps to clarify these prophesies and offers insight into the central issues of our challenges and the experience and their life changing implications.

For eighteen hundred years, the prophecies in the Book of Revelation have captured the collective Western imagination. Saint John’s rich imagery and the dramatic urgency of the looming disasters he predicts have both fascinated and frightened us with its apparent message that the end of time is near. Robin Robertson, Ph.D. deciphers the mystical theology and visions of the prophets, seers and shamans. His analysis incorporates the insights of modern mathematics and Chaos Theory, as well as his personal insights gained through his work as a Jungian therapist and teacher. Robertson holds a mirror to humanity’s need to know Self and God. He explains that Saint John’s vision foretells the massive change in consciousness that is happening in our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc
• Release date: May 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780892545834

Robin Robertson

Robin Robertson is from the north-east coast of Scotland. He has published six previous books of poetry and received various accolades, including the Petrarca-Preis, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and all three Forward Prizes. His last book, The Long Take – a narrative poem set in post-war America – won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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PREFACE

This book began in 1981, when I was beginning my training to become a therapist at a halfway home for severely disturbed younger adult patients in Southern California. Late in the year, I noticed that many of the patients began to have dreams of apocalyptic events. During psychotic episodes, they talked of floods and nuclear holocausts. One patient wrote a description of his dream that was reminiscent of William Butler Yeats' great apocalyptic poem The Second Coming. For a number of reasons, I felt confident that this patient had never read or heard Yeats' poem.

These patients lived much of their lives in a collective world that had little or nothing to do with their personal lives. For example, during paranoid delusions, many patients became convinced that the police (or the CIA or the FBI or the therapist) were reading their mind. The words they used during these acute episodes were almost the same from one patient to another. Their affect and tone of voice during such episodes had nothing to do with the person I knew during better times.

Dreams of apocalyptic events normally appear when the dreamer approaches a major change in his or her life. After all, a big change in the way we think demolishes our old patterns of thought. To the person we are before the change, it is a catastrophe. Actually it signals an enormous possibility for growth. Unfortunately, few—if any—of these patients were approaching major changes in their individual lives. Yet, since so many patients were having such dreams and delusions at the same time, I decided that they must be collective. I began to speculate that the dreams foreshadowed a collective change of consciousness. I began to watch my own dreams and the dreams of friends, waiting for these apocalyptic visions to appear. It was to be more than two years before I had such dreams myself, a bit longer before I noticed them in the dreams of others.

Meanwhile, I continued to work with the patients at the halfway home. Finding traditional psychiatric techniques largely useless with my patients, I began to work at a much deeper level. I found myself spontaneously matching my breathing pattern to theirs, my body movements to theirs. This wasn't a conscious decision and wasn't so obvious that the patients were aware it was going on. Once our bodies were synchronized, I was shocked to find myself suddenly experiencing their blocked emotions as if they were my own—their emotions seemed to pour out of them into me. I would suddenly feel anger or sadness that seemingly came out of nowhere. Most frequently, I would shed their tears for them. That may sound very strange indeed, but none of the patients ever seemed to find it odd. With their emotions released through me, they could then talk about their issues.

This was an exhilarating but frightening experience for me, as I knew these emotions were theirs, not mine. When I tried to discuss it with other therapists, they either stared at me in blank incomprehension or grew very uncomfortable. I knew that I needed the support of someone who understood what I was experiencing, but I didn't know where to turn for that support. At this critical point, I had one of the most significant dreams of my life.

HALL OF SHAMANS DREAM

In that dream, I stood at the entrance to a long narrow room. Lining both sides of the room were what initially appeared to be statues of Native American medicine men. Some were standing, some lying down. As I walked down the hall, I saw they weren't statues at all, but mummies: preserved remains of the shamans of every tribe, every time period. The room felt very holy; I felt awed in their presence. I began to dance and chant to honor them—an Indian dance with Indian words, though I knew no such dance or words. Then, suddenly, I heard a commanding voice—a voice that had to be obeyed—order me to stop. I did.

I looked for the source of the voice. It came from the oldest shaman of all, who stood at the furthest end of the corridor facing me. He walked toward me. With each step he became younger and younger, until finally—standing before me—he appeared to be a proud young man in his late twenties. Despite his youth (only slightly older than me), he still seemed as powerful and wise as before.

He said that he admired my coat, which had a beautifully inlaid figure of a hawk on the back. He obviously regarded it as a tribal symbol and asked me what tribe I was in. I told him that I wasn't in any tribe, that the hawk had come from inside me. He was surprised and impressed, but told me that it was still incomplete. He said that he would help me complete my coat by playing drums, dancing, and by other methods which would remain hidden from me for now.

I couldn't get the dream out of my mind. I had never had any particular interest in Native American culture before that. But I realized that my spontaneous way of working with my patients had awakened some deep level of healer inside me, a level that transcended my personal experience, which was best expressed by Indian shamans. The normal world around me seemed filled with power and mystery. Later that week, I mentioned my dream to my faculty advisor—a woman about my own age. She told me that she was studying under a half Cherokee/half Irish medicine chief,¹ and suggested that I call him. I did so and told him my dream. He wasn't surprised; he said that whites all over were having such dreams, then invited me to attend his ongoing weekly training groups. Those classes opened my eyes to a whole world of culture I had never been exposed to.

THE FULL MOON CEREMONY

After I felt comfortable in the sessions, I told the medicine chief about my experiences with the patients' emotions flowing through me. He was totally comfortable with that, which gave me a great deal of relief. By this time, I didn't always need to express the emotions directly. Sometimes I would instead see pictures in my head that weren't from my own experience. Often I'd find these were from the life of the patient. Other times, the picture would have clearly significant symbolic meaning, much like it had appeared in a dream, but in this case it would have be as if it were the patient's dream, not mine. After a longer period, I no longer either needed to have the emotions flow through me, or even see a picture; I simply knew what was going on with the patient and the tension was released in them much as it had been when I cried their tears.

I learned a great deal that was useful to me in those weekly sessions. For example, I learned a chakra system that was presented as a Hopi-Mayan system. I continue to teach this system in workshops to this day.² He also presented a Hopi-Mayan model of psychological types that had similarities to Carl Jung's model of psychological types, but with some additional strengths and some weaknesses.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned occurred one evening in late 1981—night of a full moon—when about a dozen of us gathered at the home of the medicine chief in order to celebrate a Full-Moon ceremony. We sat in a circle on the ground. A water-filled bowl, with rose petals floating on the surface, stood in the middle between us. The medicine chief prayed to father sky and mother earth, to each of the four directions, to the moon above. He passed around a small bowl containing beef jerky and we each ate a small portion. A long pipe was passed to each of us in turn. We accepted the pipe in a particular way, turned it one full turn, took three puffs, and passed it to the person on our left. Then the culmination of the ceremony began: the give-away.

The medicine chief took a small mound of corn meal in his palm. He closed his eyes and thought of something in his life - a behavior perhaps - that he no longer wanted to be a part of him. He took a pinch of the corn meal and threw it into the bowl as he gave away the unwanted behavior. As he was fond of saying, in his earthy way: Give your shit to Mother Earth. It makes the flowers grow. Then he passed the remaining corn meal to the person on his left and the give-away continued. My wife and I were directly across from him, about half way around the circle. This was the first Native American ceremony of any kind which we had ever attended and I had wondered what, if any, effect it could have for us, since it was a ritual from a culture we knew nothing about. However, as the ceremony progressed, I found myself impressed by its beauty and simplicity.

When the corn meal was passed to me, I bowed my head and thought of a problem that had been bothering me. I took a pinch of corn meal and threw it into the bowl - and got the shock of my life! As it left my hand, I felt a spark shoot between my hand and the water as if I had touched a Van de Graaf generator. The temperature around the circle immediately seemed to drop sharply. I was so startled that I hardly realized that I had passed the remaining corn meal on to my wife. When she and the others finished, the medicine chief said some closing words. By this time, the temperature was so cold that we were all shivering. When my wife and I walked to our car, she and I couldn't wait to tell each other the same thing: how when we threw the corn meal into the bowl, the air around us suddenly grew cold. That was my first experience with the power of Native American ritual.

This exposure to Native American ideas, as interpreted by this teacher, led me to a deeper exploration of Hopi culture and prophesies which I'll discuss in chapter 1.

THE BOOK OF REVELATION

A third element that appeared in my life at this time was a sudden need to read and write about the Book of Revelation of the Christian bible. As a child I had been raised Catholic and hadn't had a great deal of exposure to the bible. In fact, I don't believe that I had ever before even read the Book of Revelation. But suddenly I felt compelled to read and interpret it, much as I would a dream, with no idea exactly why I was doing it or what it meant. After several months of this work, I decided to show what I had to a trusted friend to see what he thought. He didn't know what to make of it. It wasn't that he reacted adversely, he just didn't understand what I was talking about. I remember laughing and deciding that this was probably a very personal effort to heal something in me, much like many volumes I had written of dream interpretation. I continued to work on it until I had written about a hundred pages, at which point I felt comfortable setting it aside as having accomplished what I needed to accomplish. Though I had been totally absorbed in this hermeneutic amplification of Revelation, as soon as I stopped writing, I forgot about the project entirely..

Several years later, I woke up one day and knew what the manuscript was about: I saw the Book of Revelation as a Big Dream about a major change in consciousness, one in which human beings realized that divinity lived inside each of us, not outside in some distant heaven. I felt that the time was arriving for this insight to be experienced by everyone, not simply the few like a Christ or a Buddha. Armed with this new insight, I pulled out the hundred pages I'd already written. On rereading the manuscript, I realized that while writing it had planted a seed that grew into my new insight, it wasn't adequate to serve that purpose for others. So I threw out the hundred pages and started all over again.

My basic method was to move through the Book of Revelation in order, from beginning to end, and write what came up in me about each part that I read. The writing flowed, but the book felt like it had no inherent structure. The themes which emerged in various chapters seemed to have no connection with each other. Nevertheless, I kept writing.

Then one day it all fell into place. I could suddenly see how the order of the chapters needed to be rearranged, what parts were still missing. And I realized that the parts that were missing were already contained either in articles I had already published, or in articles I had written which remained unpublished. I had already included a number of personal remembrances in an attempt to bring this highly spiritual material down-to-earth. Now I knew exactly which additional events from my life would fit into the structure of the book. I realized that I had already written the book I wanted to write, the book I didn't know how to write! The unconscious call to write the book had already created a structure without my realizing it.

The structure of the book seemed to have emerged ineluctably from the unconscious much like the channeled books written in a state of automatic writing. I would say that the structure was contained within the structure of the Book of Revelation itself, as processed through one particular individual. That made it in one sense highly idiosyncratic but in another open to anyone pulled by the powerful material of Revelation. In all my writing, I find that the writing process frequently takes me down pathways I couldn't have envisioned before I started writing. Nevertheless, I largely remain in control of the material. This book was a marked contrast. Someone was clearly in charge of the material, and it wasn't me. Writing it required a receptive quality that I think is probably closer to what a woman experiences during pregnancy than the triumphant masculine creativity I had usually experienced in the past. If so, it was a very long pregnancy: seven years from first conception to the first edition of the book, and now in this newly revised edition another twenty-one years.

Now that it's written, it easier for me to see what I've tried to do (I'll say I though, as I've indicated, I doesn't really describe the situation very accurately). I've tried to bring the Book of Revelation to life for a modern reader, struggling with modern problems. The Book of Revelation resembles a spiral as it moves closer to the center of the mystery. I've followed a similar spiral path around the central issues. While I've drawn on C. G. Jung's psychology for the core of my study, I've discussed oracles and neurophysiology, shamanic rituals and modern mathematics, and much more. These are there because they are all important issues for me that were called forth by my reading and reacting to Revelation. And because I've tried to bring the issues down to a human level with illustrations from my own life, many people have told me that this freed them from fears that they had always had about the Book of Revelation.

This is not a book written for either biblical or psychological scholars (though over the years, I've receive some praise from both). It's written straightforwardly for all of us who are trying to make sense out of a time when nothing seems to make sense. I hope that it means as much to you as it does to me.

Even a little book of spiritual knowledge is too much for us to swallow;

it tastes bitter unless it is shared. (St. John the Divine eats the little book.

Albrect Durer. First printed in the 1498 edition of The Revelation of Saint John).

CHAPTER I

VISIONS OF THE MILLENNIUM

Beginning with their Genesis, and carrying through their Old Testament of previous worlds, and their New Testament of the present to the Revelation of their esoteric ceremonialism, the tenets of this books are as sacred to the Hopis as the Judaic-Christian Bible is to other people.³

The world has grown so complex, so vague and ambiguous, that it sometimes seems beyond any individual's ability to understand, much less to control. The brave dreams of our Victorian ancestors—so convinced that they were on the verge of solving all the mysteries, conquering all the demons that had held us captive for so long—have grown stale and crumbled into dust. Once the theme of progress seemed an anthem that would lead us forthrightly (and self-righteously) into a glorious future of unending achievement; now progress has stalled and advance has yielded to retreat. The mood has passed from optimism to pessimism, then to despair and, most recently, to a greedy hedonistic apathy.

Yet on the horizon looms a sight so glorious and strange that we don't even have mental categories to encompass the vision. In one of Colin Wilson's books, he tells the story (perhaps apocryphal) of Captain James Cook's arrival in the South Seas. When Cook's great three-masted ships appeared on the horizon, the islanders could not see the ships. They literally could not see the ships and were startled when the white men appeared on their shores. Without some concept of such a ship, they could not find a mental compartment adequate for the strange sight before them, and so they saw nothing at all. Like the islanders, today we stare at visions that fill the entire field of sight and somehow manage to blank them out and see nothing at all.

All over the world, people are trying to contain these strange visions in some way. Change is never welcome, and when nothing but disaster is expected, all change appears to portend disaster. If the world isn't going to die of starvation, it will blow itself up. If the economic structure of the world isn't going to collapse, leaving the rich richer and the poor dead, then the reverse will happen: the undeveloped nations will become so powerful that the current world-powers will become second-rate has-beens. If the dictators don't get us, the terrorists will. We've heard so many terrible scenarios that we just sit numbly, expecting the worst. Yet all of these are just attempts to explain the previous unexplainable. When the familiar disappears, how else to try and explain the new?

All over the world, prophets are arising, reminding us of the old prophesies of world's end, or crying new prophesies to fit our times. All seem so close to our circumstances that we shiver and intellectualize them out of our sight, trying in our tired, frightened way to exorcize the demons that threaten to swallow us.

HOPI HISTORY

The Hopis first released information about their history, myths, legends, and religious ceremonies—all of which form a single entity for the Hopis—to Frank Waters, who published them in his Book of the Hopi in 1963.⁴ However, the Hopis revealed only part of their mysteries at that time. More recently, they have chosen to release additional information through a variety of spokesmen, including members of other tribes, breeds, even whites.⁵ However, to understand the Hopi prophesies, we have to understand something of the Hopis.

The Hopis are an isolated, introverted, mysterious people, living alone on the plateaus of Arizona, surrounded by their numerous out-going neighbors: the Navajos. Most anthropologists think that the Hopis were a Mongolian people who crossed the then-existent land bridge over the Bering Strait twelve hundred years ago, and then migrated southward. Tree-ring analysis shows that their three main settlements at Oraibi in Arizona were first settled over seven hundred years ago. The Hopis have lived there in their splendid isolation ever since.

The Hopis' own histories tell a very different story. According to Waters, they assert that they made a great ocean crossing, passing over a series of stones (i.e., islands), thousands of years ago. They didn't come from the North and migrate southward; they entered in Middle America and migrated northward. The medicine chief I studied with said that—in histories not revealed to Waters—the Hopis tell of the time before this migration, when an earlier migration was made—from the stars. They say that their ancestors came from the Dog Star Sirius one hundred and eighty thousand years ago. Interestingly, an African tribe with no known connection with the Hopis—the Dogon—also believe that their ancestors came from Sirius. The Dogon are also aware that Sirius has a twin star not visible to the naked eye—a fact not known to modern science until 1862.

In favor of the anthropologists' theory is the fact that every Hopi child is born with the Mongolian spot at the base of their spine, which seems irrefutable evidence that the Hopi, like their probable cousins, the Mayans, are Mongolian in origin. Other evidence, however, favors the Hopis' version of history and argues that their Mongolian ancestors came to the Americas long before the land bridge across the Bering Strait came into existence . For example, fossil remains have placed men on the North American continent over twenty thousand years ago. In addition, analysis of blood groupings show that Native Americans have the purest Type-O blood groups in existence. This would mean that Native Americans were isolated from their ancestors much longer ago than anthropologists would have us believe. Frank Waters says:

There is a great body of literature, ever growing from antiquity to the present, asserting that sea crossings were made from Asia to America centuries before the Vikings and Columbus arrived from across the Atlantic. The earliest of these is the most ancient Chinese classic, Shan Hai King, compiled about 2250 B.C. It describes a voyage across the ‘Great Eastern Sea' and a two-thousand-mile journey down the length of the land beyond. Long regarded as a book of myth, it is now asserted to be an accurate geographic description of various landmarks in America including the Great Luminous Canyon now known as Grand Canyon.⁶

WORLDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

According to Waters, the Hopis' histories/mythologies talk of four successive worlds, each destroyed by a great catastrophe, after each of which men emerged into a new world. To the Hopis, the destruction of these worlds is—at one and the same time—both literal and symbolic. The worlds represent both stages of consciousness and epochs of human history. At each stage, there is both a collective state of consciousness within the world and a corresponding personal state of consciousness within each person. The latter corresponds to a particular psycho-physical location in the human body. We are now living at the end of the fourth world, which corresponds to the most material, the least spiritual, of the four worlds. It is the nadir; when it ends, a higher series of worlds begins.

According to Waters, after their emergence into the fourth world at the Tuwanasavi [i.e., Center of the Universe]—which is located at the current site of Hopi settlements in Arizona—the Hopis split into four groups or clans, each of which went off to either the north, east, south, or west. Their task was to journey until they reached the sea, then return to their starting point. Having completed one round, they would start in a new direction and again make a full round-trip. They were to proceed thus either clockwise or counter-clock-wise until they completed all four rounds. Their journeys would have formed a great cross or swastika about the Tuwanasavi, where they could come together in a permanent settlement, free of clan arguments or differences.

They left pictorial records—glyphs—of their migrations on rocks throughout the Americas. Mayan glyphs can be readily read by Hopis, which buttresses the Hopis' claim that both had common ancestors. These pictorial records describe clearly how many of their four journeys each group had taken, and the order in which they were taken. Only the record at Oraibi, the home of the Hopi, shows all four migrations completed.

Petroglyphs and pictographs of the migration occur in many different locations from Chichen Itza in Mexico to Arizona and Colorado. The circles record the number of rounds completed. (Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi).

The symbol found at Chichen Itza [author's note: the capital of the Mayan empire; a city which—like Babylon—became the capital of successive empires, each time to be abandoned and later rediscovered] indicates that the people covered only one round before returning to the same area and attests to the Hopi belief that the Mayans were simply aberrant Hopi clans who did not complete their migrations⁷.

The Emergence and the migrations are so beautiful in concept, so profoundly symbolic, one is tempted to accept