HOPE Healing Of Persons Exceptional

Crossing the Bridge of Time:

A Native American prophecy and Genesis 3

In 1994, a Native American spiritual leader addressed a group of which I was a part. This person spoke about the nature of the time in which we live today and told us that an old prophecy would be realized in this time. The prophecy, as I remembered it, went like this: Sometime after the turn of the century, around 2002, a spiritual bridge would open for those who had intended the spiritual path by 1992. It would stay open for ten years and never be closed to anyone, but the longer one waited before intending the spiritual path, the harder it would be to find the bridge. This person described the bridge as a bridge in time that would take a person ahead the equivalent of 400 years.

This person went on to say that it was as if time had a wave function and over this past century the frequency and amplitude of the wave had been increasing geometrically. It would reach a point where the equivalent of a wave-function collapse would take place… two adjacent peaks in time would come together over a trough representing the equivalent of 400 years of linear time. The bridge would last for ten years before falling apart. At that point, the presentation ended... and no one asked, "And what happens next?" We all simply went our own merry ways.

I, for one, liked what I had heard. After all, I had become fully aware of the nature of my spiritual path in 1987 so I was certainly destined for salvation! (Who says? Read on.) However, the question of what lay at the end of the bridge began to dog my thoughts. Was there going to be a separation of worlds somewhat similar to what Philip Wylie described in his book, The Disappearance (Lightyear; December 1993. ISBN: 0899684157)? Would those who crossed the bridge acquire a higher energetic vibration that made them invisible to those who did not cross the bridge, much like the ninth prophecy in Jim Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy (Warner Books; January 1995. ISBN: 044651862X )? Every answer I arrived at seemed inadequate. However, I have learned to be patient and to state the intention to receive the answer at the right time—a time not of my own choosing.

I meditated on the question. I ruminated on the question. I dialogued on the question. I waited. I wondered. It seemed that crossing the bridge was a form of realization—awakening—Christ/Buddha-becoming. Then I considered that these Beings might return—as Jesus/Bodhisattvas—to stand at the edge of the pool of human suffering to lend a hand to those who reached the surface and called for help… more wondering…more meditating.

I was talking about this prophecy and its questions and implications in a HOPE Group meeting in February, 2003, and the answer came... I remembered that crossing the bridge was the "equivalent" of moving forward 400 years in time. I saw that crossing the bridge would get the spiritually minded individual a picture of the spiritually developed world in 2403, and that person would return to the twenty-first century and set in motion a ripple that would direct the course of history over the next 400 years.... The Christ/Buddhas did, indeed, return as Jesus/Bodhisattvas!

I had previously held an image of myself as a "doorman" to the bridge for as long as I had had known about the bridge. I had a sense that when the time was right, I, too, would cross the bridge into the future and join the others. With this new image of visiting the future and returning, but without destroying the image of "doorman," I wondered if I had already crossed the bridge and returned with an image. Over the next two or three days, it became clear that I had…. I had developed a point of childhood knowledge into a field of adult understanding when I wrote SoulCircling: The Journey to the Who ©2002! Let me explain….

At this time in our history, a significant number of adults are aware that children often seem to have some wisdom-knowledge that all too often confuses adults who then make significant efforts to belittle it. These children want to talk about the things they know but when they get belittled for their efforts, they find it simpler to avoid the adults who do not want to listen but want to teach.

My family of origin was no exception; there was significant spirituality that was all too often colored by religion. My mother was the Episcopal daughter of an allopathic general practitioner, and she had healing hands that were every bit as powerful as the prayers of my father's Christian Scientist family. However, she was ruled by her physical senses, confused by intuition, and unwilling to accept the healing power in her large, graceful, artist-musician's hands.

My father's mother was a great teacher of biblical lore in my very early childhood, but she took the Bible literally. As a Christian Scientist, my grandmother said repeatedly that love was synonymous with God. However, when she first read me the third chapter of the book of Genesis, I "knew" it was "wrong" because God showed no love for His children—angrily and hatefully banishing them for their childish, immature disobedience. That was anything but loving! I brought it up to her and, later, to others, but no one was open to a discussion; they looked at my knowledge as "a figment of (my) imagination." The outstanding exception was the only self-professed atheist in the bunch—she knew how to listen!

When I was eleven years old, I was having a discussion with my mother that turned into an argument. At one point I said something that I “knew” with an enthusiasm appropriate for my age and my mother looked at me with a thunder-struck expression and said, "Dear, how can you say that if you love me?" That hurt! I did a right face, stuffed my hands in my pockets, and slouched out of the living room saying to myself, "Gosh, I don't think Mom knows what love is, and maybe I don't either, but someday I'll find out!"

Well, it would be many years before I could say with any degree of surety that I was coming close to realizing that intention. As I look back over my life, I see how I have been graced with a gift of loving relationships that I had to work with and equally graced with a gift of anger that I had to work through. I have not finished the work on either the love or the anger, but both of these projects are well developed. In 1987 I started a support group for people who had cancer in my surgical practice that they called HOPE Love was an essential component of the process. The following year, I studied A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace; 2nd edition [1975], ISBN: 0960638881) for the first time, and accepted the principal of the course that was to teach love without trying to define it.

The Course emphasized how dangerous the ego could be and I could see that in my life. I set out to try to erase my ego, but it would not put up with my efforts. I then decided to accept my ego lovingly and show my appreciation for the hard work it had done for my whole life. As it accepted love, my ego softened its grasp on things it held dear. As I began this revolutionary approach to my fearful, judgmental self, I began learning about the soul, and I could begin to see that I had two inner directors: one secular and one spiritual. About this time, I heard Matthew Fox say in public that he had observed that Roman Catholicism seemed to pay less attention to the soul than it appeared to merit, so he had explored his Roman Catholic traditions to see if the soul had ever been a more prominent part of the church's teachings. He found that it had been an important way of thinking about ourselves until the beginning of the Age of Reason, 300 years ago. At that time, the thinkers of the day put the soul in the mind because its existence could not be scientifically proven. Fox got my attention and the nature of soul fascinated me. Its eternal, spiritual nature became clear to me as I read the growing wealth of literature about near-death out-of-body experiences. Coincidentally, I was directly exposed to some of these experiences in my surgical practice and in the HOPE support groups that I had started in 1987.

I took a past life regression training course with Brian Weiss, MD, and he told us that the past life experiences of one of his patients caused him to study his Jewish traditions to see if they had once held a belief in reincarnation—necessitating a belief in the existence of the soul. He found that they did—until 300 years ago. He then looked at Christian history and found that Christians, too, had believed in reincarnation until 300 years ago. He then examined Islam and found the same thing for that third and youngest of the Faith Family religions!

As I, a soul, was coming to terms with my body's ego, I heard a tape by Wayne Dyer in which he said that the Garden of Eden legend in the third chapter of the book of Genesis was the story of the ego. It made perfect sense! The legend was written some 2700 years ago, having likely been a part of our oral tradition for many hundreds of years before that. It was clear to me that the legend was an attempt to explain why we had perpetuated so much egregious harm on each other for so many thousands of years. To the mind-set of that day, it was inconceivable that God could have given us knowledge because we had done so much harm with it. We still believe to this day that we had to have obtained it by some other means than as a divine gift. So we created the serpent to blame for stealing God's knowledge and giving it to us. Furthermore, men blamed women for being suckered by this snake! In short, “somebody's wrong and it sure as hell ain't me!” This shame-blame-guilt thinking is pure ego-work. (And so is hubris, the attitude in the earlier boast of salvation.)

In 12-step recovery circles, "ego" is an acronym for "ease God out". As Genesis 3 can be seen as the story of the ego, God's admonition to His children about not eating of the fruit of His tree of knowledge of good and evil has every hallmark of the behavior of a drunk and his stash of booze! Every good drunk tells his children that they had better not touch his whiskey! When they do, which is almost inevitable, he brutalizes them. So God, as the alcoholic angry parent, banishes His own children from His household and tells them never to come back. Once they are out of the gate, He fixes it so that they can never get back in. Please be aware… knowledge can be just as addictively dangerous as whiskey!

No! God is not a drunk! We, His children, are not disobedient—just immature—with a perfect parent. God gave us knowledge, knowing that all the time we were using it beautifully we were misusing it egregiously—and judge ourselves horribly for that misuse. The God that is synonymous with love has no fear-based hatred and It looks at Its children with soft, kind eyes, knowing that every misuse of knowledge contains a lesson in its right use.

The world of 2403 is a world in which we have recognized and acknowledged the ego for its resourceful skills, all of which are written in our genetic code. In this new time, we have taught it to devote its strength and energy to the service of the soul's intent. The soul is a manifest holographic fragment of the Spirit that comes with a core passion to create a one-of-a-kind work of art that is a single volume in a marvelous, wondrous encyclopedia of the universal experience of Being. The world of 2403 is a beautiful world of Being devoted to its experience of God. It is a world in which almost all communication is telepathic, including travel. It is a world that knows that mind-travel is virtually instantaneous. It knows how to star-travel.

The Bridge of Time is open. Many are already back from the other side. They have discovered that the knowledge they had as children was accurate. They are planting the seeds that manifest themselves 400 years from now.

I am not alone in this awareness. Last year I received an e-mail from a dear friend that contained the following message:

To my fellow swimmers:

There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore, they will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know that the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.

And I say: see who is there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves, for the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt. The time of the lone wolf is over.

Gather yourselves. Banish the word "struggle" from your attitude and vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

(The person responsible for this beautiful message does not wish to be identified with any other name than Human.)

In the week of March 16, 2003, I received an e-mail that contained a wonderful and appropriate Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., some parts of which I quote in closing:

…. I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is–we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement...

I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind... Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme. We have a history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially–we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection. Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered can be restored to life again….

The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

http://www.mavenproductions.com/esteswindow4.html

There is a field beyond all polarities that we reach when we suspend judgment. It is equally and vitally important that we look at our egos and our souls with the soft eyes of compassion. Our egos are born in our DNA. Our souls come here borne by our DNA. Our egos can wander far afield and create all sorts of havoc if they have no spiritual home. Our souls are adrift if they have no physical home. They need each other and God made it so. Each of us is a ship of life of which the ego is the navigator and the soul is the captain that came here with "earth orders".

The true story of the Garden of Eden is that we left God’s garden in our own shame for all the harm we had done. We went far afield and survived incredible insults. We have begun to wonder if there is not a better way. Some of us have begun to look up in the sky instead of down at the ground in front of our tired and shameful feet. A regular flicker of light comes from the horizon behind us, and those of us who have already begun to follow its call are standing on the horizon calling and beckoning to the rest of us to turn and follow them. Their messages tell us that there is a beautiful arch on their horizon with a shining beacon on it that we thought when we left was a spinning sword to kill us if we ever came back. They tell us that there are a couple of outposts at the arch calling them back home. They tell us that there is a beautiful city on the other side of the arch, with stairs arching up from every rooftop. Our ears pick up the distant, clear call, “Come home!”

As we come home over the next 400 years, keep in mind that everything is divine, and time is only a metaphor for the Life of Being. Give yourself permission to be aware that out beyond all old ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. There we shall meet and discover why Creation made us. We will know that that field has been promised us since the beginning of Time.

Kind, blessing, and loving thoughts come.

top