Articles from the Religious Research Journal
2007
By Tom Hemphill
This holiday season will be the third anniversary of the December 26, 2004, tsunami which began with an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in western Indonesia and created tidal waves from Thailand to India and Sri Lanka, and on all the way to the east coast of Africa, thousands of miles away. Most of us cannot imagine anything so powerful as to cause tidal waves thousands of miles away; yet, the 2004 tsunami took thousands of lives and destroyed billions of dollars worth of homes, cities, infrastructure, farmlands – indeed, everything in its path.
The same phenomena were observed with the last really big tsunami – the 1960 earthquake off the coast of Chile which caused flooding and devastation not only in Chile but also in Hawaii and in Japan. In both these Pacific Ocean tsunamis the “triggering event” – an earthquake - happened many hours before the massive tidal wave reached across the ocean.
Improved tsunami detection devices are now being developed and installed so that future tsunamis can be detected shortly after the triggering event and many hours before they reach distant shores. Hopefully, warning can reach potentially affected areas long before a wall of water buries the coast.
And what has all this to do with Religious Research?
For the past 15 years I have been speaking and writing about the approaching shift in our reality. This has been described in numerous ways. Students of noetics might call it the opening or major expansion or fulfillment of human consciousness. Students of Mayan culture might refer to it as the “end of time” – time as we now know it – according to the Mayan calendar. Devout Jews, Christians and Muslims might identify it, respectively, as the coming of the Messiah, the Second Coming of Christ or the coming of the Imam Mahdi.
Many people in spiritual circles speak of the Ascension with the understanding that we will “ascend” from existence in the current third dimension to a new existence in the fifth dimension. In the 1960s we began using the term New Age for this coming mega-shift.
Gregg Braden writes of the “Zero Point” in human evolution when the magnetic energy of Earth will change and we humans must change with it. Still others note that Earth’s base resonant frequency, which has remained steady at 8 Hz per second for thousands of years, is now going through a rapid increase, projected to reach 13 Hz per second. It is as though Earth’s heart is beating faster. Many spiritualists believe that this presages a similar ascent to a higher vibration for humankind; they would describe the upcoming global change as a vibrational shift or escalation.
Barbara Marx Hubbard describes this event of global transformation as our “planetary birth,” when we humans are effectively “born” from our limited awareness of the past 10,000 years (like a time of racial gestation) into our full consciousness as “universal humans.” Many spiritual sources, including the Christian New Testament, project a time of judgment, with some persons going forward or “up” into a closer relationship with God, while others are kept distant or “lost” from relationship with God.
In her latest book (soon to be completed), Helen Roberts refers to this simply as the “Great Event.” That says it well.
The Paradigm Shift – The Great Event
I have often referred to this world-changing Great Event simply as a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift occurs when some essential component of a larger system changes and, with it, the entire system is transformed. For example, with the development of jet engines, propellers became obsolete; aircraft still look much the same and fly much the same, but a jet engine typically does not require a propeller.
Similarly, for decades telephones relied on copper wires strung on poles or buried in cables around the globe to transmit voice communication. With the advent of satellite-linked cell phones, additional copper wires are no longer necessary. We still use phones to talk as before, but copper wires are not carrying the sound in a cell phone.
With a paradigm shift some of what existed before continues to exist, but the fundamental nature of the old reality is set aside in light of a greater or more complete “truth.” We – humanity, the whole 6,635,000,000 of us – now face a paradigm shift like nothing else in human history.
The coming Great Event will change humanity’s story of who we are; we will have to discover and claim a new story of who we are. And our new story, our mythology, our self-understanding will be better informed, inclusive of a wider truth, and closer to the Truth which is of God. We will be awakened from life as we have known it (or assumed it to be) into a “new paradigm” of life wherein self-awareness, global consciousness and spiritual openness become one.
I believe this shall be the time when, as Jesus said, “Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.” I insist now, as I always have, that this is not so much an end as it is a beginning, not so much a judgment on what has gone wrong as an opportunity to make our world right – from our relationship with our Creator to our relationship with our own selves, and from our relationship with all of humanity to our relationship with Mother Earth herself.
What is coming is not so much a death or a birth as it is a transformation. The transformation of caterpillar to butterfly is as nothing compared to the transformation from humanity as we have been into the fully Spirit-aware humanity that we shall be. “In the twinkling of an eye” we shall all be made new, and a new era of enlightened humanity cooperating fully with the will and purpose of God will be established on the earth.
We cannot reach our maturity as a race of divine beings – each of us an incarnate individuated portion of God’s own Spirit – without this transformation. It will be a new paradigm indeed!
Many people have identified December of 2012 as the moment when this transformation shall take place. Sometimes I feel we cannot possibly wait another five years. Other times I wonder if it will be 20 or 30 years more. But there is no doubt that it is happening now. We do not speak of an event shrouded in the uncertain mists of a distant future. I have studied and watched for the coming transformation of humanity since I began my spiritual studies at Religious Research in 1966. I have never doubted that this event will come about in my lifetime.
We have begun.
So what has all this to do with tsunamis?
I believe the “triggering event” for the transformation of humanity and the establishment of a new paradigm has already happened. I cannot define it in physical terms; I hesitate to identify a single historical event (perhaps September 11, 2001 - “9/11”?) as the trigger.
I believe the trigger has happened in the greater spiritual reality within which our limited physical reality is a subset. If an event such as “9/11” is a world-wide eye-opener, I believe it is physical evidence that the Great Event has indeed been triggered on the Other Side and is in the process of being fully expressed in the physical universe.
Other indicators that we are entering a new awareness, a new definition of reality, are readily available. Thanks to the Internet, the World Wide Web, every person in the world with access to a computer (more than a billion of us so far) has free and instant access to virtually all of the information he or she wishes. Never in human history has anything like this been remotely possible. Indeed, when I was a boy, this was the stuff of wild-eyed science fiction.
Likewise, when Dr. Franklin Loehr, founder of Religious Research Foundation, first began to speak of the inter-related nature of science and religion, he was dismissed as a kook. Clearly, science and religion had nothing to say to each other!
Yet, as was delightfully shared in the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?" leaders in the field of quantum physics readily admit that they are determining with increasing clarity that our reality is not what we have traditionally perceived it to be. In fact, using scientific language, quantum physics describes a reality very much in keeping with what the world’s great spiritual visionaries have been saying for centuries. It appears that the time of massive transformation-ascension-awareness-fulfillment may well have a basis in science.
So, back to tsunamis. What has made past tsunamis so deadly is that there was no way to know if an earthquake thousands of miles away would send a massive tidal wave to our shores. The tsunami would appear seemingly “out of nowhere,” and there was no way to prepare or escape its path. With modern detection devices using a satellite link-up, the impact of a tsunami on the ocean floor can be detected, its intensity, direction and rate of speed estimated. Those who are aware can be prepared for it.
I believe that the Great Event is approaching us not with physical devastation but with spiritual transformation. Moreover, I believe it is already underway.
If we could place seismometers or other scientific devices along the spiritual path of this tsunami, we could estimate its intensity, direction and rate of speed, and prepare accordingly. No doubt, that is precisely what our Elder Brother and Sisters in Spirit - as Dr. John called them - have done and are doing.
The Great Event is not some magical, far-off, fantasy, religious, wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if kind of event. The time for dreaming is past. It is real and is coming – coming possibly faster than we have anticipated.
People in Sri Lanka were mostly not aware of an earthquake just a few hours earlier in Indonesia, and certainly had no clue there was a surge of powerful energy coming to their shores. So also humanity at the close of 2007 are mostly not aware that a spiritual triggering event has already taken place and a surge of powerful, transforming spiritual energy is coming to our planet, to our hearts, to our understanding of reality, to our paradigm of life.
We are now in the brief interlude between the far-away trigger and the arrival of a tsunami. Spiritually, we are now in the time when the tidal surge is racing powerfully at many hundreds of miles per hour across the ocean floor, undetectable except with sophisticated equipment.
It is only as the tidal surge reaches land that its height and breadth become obvious. For most of humanity, it will be only as the Great Event takes place that people come to realize that something big is happening to them and around them. Those of us who know this event is coming also know that it brings a transformation to greater wholeness and blessing.
When the tsunami hits shore
Yet we also know that it is humanity’s nature to resist change, to distrust the unknown and to prefer the familiarity of the status quo to the challenges of real growth. Thus, we can anticipate that many people will not greet the Great Event with shouts of praise and tears of joy, but with fear, condemnation and a reaching for survival on familiar – that is, old paradigm – terms. Such desperate survival attempts – by sticking to the old ways of doing things – get swept away when a tsunami hits shore.
Throughout the world, normal wave action is circular. You can see this at the beach as each waves breaks and curls in upon itself. (In big waves, this is the famous “curl” that surfers seek to glide through on their surfboards.)
However, a tsunami wave is not circular but straightforward. Even as it hits land it just keeps going – and going. Also a tsunami wave is not a thin sheet of water that passes through. Rather, the tsunami carries enough water with it to bury the land under 20 or 30 feet or more of water, and it takes time for that water to run gradually back into the sea. And the first tsunami wave is followed by more waves, often bigger than the first.
All of the precautions that one might take at the beach or living near the sea for dealing with high waves or a storm surge of a few feet (as is often brought by a hurricane) are completely irrelevant in the event of a tsunami. It is so powerful and so much more than anything that can be anticipated, that there is no protection from it.
I believe a spiritual tsunami is already on its way.
I was guided to be aware of the paradigm shift some 15 years ago. It seems so long ago – no cell phones back then and very few computers! At that time we had Dr. John’s teachings on the Great Event, Dr. Franklin Loehr’s writings, the Mayan prophecy, the Harmonic Convergence, and our own sense of expectancy – but certainly no worldwide consensus among spiritual leaders about the coming new paradigm or its timing. Now this anticipation of transformation is widely accepted as a reality by most of us who seek to know and follow Spirit.
In a 1992 speech at a Religious Research conference I spoke of this coming event as a paradigm shift. I concluded then, “It is happening now.” I was certain then as I am now that the Great Event, for which all of human history up to now has merely been the prelude, is unfolding. Then, as now, I acknowledge that the precise timing for this event is in God’s hands, even as Christ said 2000 years ago, and it could come in two years or in 20 - or in 200, for that matter.
But I have sensed since the 1960s that I would see this Great Event of spiritual transformation – the Coming of the Promised One – in my lifetime; and I have perceived since the early 1990s that the intensity is building for it to occur soon. Barbara Marx Hubbard links this to the pressure in a woman’s body as she prepares to give birth. The mother’s body itself goes through a kind of transformation as it prepares to focus all its energy on the hard labor and great event of giving birth to New Life.
So also, we can sense around us, both in what is breaking down and what is breaking through, that pressure is building such that there can be no fixing, no turning back, no resolution. We can only go forward. When the time of birth comes, the birth must happen. It is too late to seek any other answer. Barbara says the time is very near – “the head is crowning.”
A Time of Great Fitna
The coming time of increasing pressure may be daunting. As I wrote in the second quarter, 2007, issue of the Religious Research Journal, the Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) prophesied that just before the end of the world as we know it, there would come a time of great “fitna.” Fitna is an Arabic word whose definitions include schism, upheaval, war, disagreement, division and anarchy all at once. It specifically alludes to a time involving a trial of faith. The faithful were urged to avoid the fitna by going up to a high mountain – presumably both removing themselves from the physical location of the fitna, as well as avoiding giving in to a fitna of fear or panic within themselves.
Nevertheless, we need not be afraid. We should not be afraid. This “birth,” like any other, will be accomplished through great effort – the “labor” of birthing. Yet, what mother having given birth to a beloved baby would choose otherwise? Everything in our religious upbringing teaches us that the coming of the new paradigm is an event of goodness, of joy, of peace, of spiritual awakening, of the presence of Emmanuel – “God with us.”
The Great Event itself is the moment toward which all of humanity has been aspiring throughout our existence. It will arrive, not with a destructive wave of water, but with a healing-birthing-empowering wave of spiritual energy. St. Paul wrote, “All things work together for good for those who love God and seek to do His will.” And so it shall be.
The Great Event – the salvation of Planet Earth and of humanity – is not just a distant dream. It has already begun. The energy of spiritual awakening is racing across the distance between the triggering event and the Great Event. It is as though fifteen years ago we could perceive a pregnancy; today we are in the delivery room. Thus, we now have a whole new sense of immediacy, a sense of in-your-face.
Do not say, “It is not here yet.” Instead, say, “It is happening. It is arriving. It has already begun and nothing can stop it now.”
For Christians, the weeks before Christmas are called Advent. Spoken of but not generally practiced in America today, Advent is a time of expectation, of anticipation, of certain knowledge that He Who once came to us in the form of a helpless baby shall come again in power and in blessing. During Advent the devout Christian does not say “Christ is not here yet.” but rather, “Christ is coming.”
So also, we - humanity, created with God’s energy and for God’s purpose, and who have come thus far with God’s love and presence – will leave our self-awareness of being helpless, incomplete, flawed beings, and will know and embrace a fullness of Life beyond anything we can now imagine.
It will be a complete paradigm shift, a transformation, a Great Event. This isn’t a dream; it is the fulfillment of our destiny. This isn’t a fantasy; it’s a real event in real time. This isn’t a distant hope; it is already happening. Like a tsunami racing under the spiritual ocean, although it is not yet visible here on the distant beach of the physical world, it is already racing toward us with great power. In truth, it is happening now.
The following Message from Hopi Elders has often been presented in spiritual circles in recent years. Many people do not know, however, that this was first written and circulated in September 2001:
"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 the river has its destination. 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 in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personal, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. WE ARE THE ONES WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR"