Two summers ago -- after a talk I gave on our experiences with a multidimensional teacher in 1969 in Georgia and the tie-in, as I saw it, to 1996,  Hale-Bopp, the Blue Kachina Prophecies, and "Ascension" by the devotees of  Heavenís Gate -- I was approached by a spiritualist minister who earnestly insisted that the biggest crisis facing our planet is not black-ops, alien presences, pole shifts or any of the effects of what I was calling millennial fever but rather the very mechanical and mundane collapse of technocracy due to programming errors in the 1950s.   With intense concern, he urged me to read 20 pages of single spaced text describing technological Armageddon.

 Prior to that I had only been vaguely aware of the  "Y2K" -- "Year Two Thousand" -- computer problem.  The survivalists I was familiar with were   reacting to what they perceived as the erosion of constitutional liberties, such as the right to privacy and the right to bear arms.  I shared some of their concerns.  They did then and still do believe that Big Brother intends to strip us of our ability to resist, then impose a One World Government.  Black helicopters over Kansas precipitate  retaliatory para-military strikes against the Feds in Oklahoma City.  Paranoia leads to tragedy.  Senseless suffering dominates the fire-gorged skyline.

 By comparison, a computer bug seemed trivial.  I didnít buy it.
 

Freak out

I couldnít imagine why the internal clocks in non-reprogrammed computers would freak out when they flip from the last moment of 1999 to the first of  2000.  Even if it read that day as 1/1/00 -- because in order to save some space the programmers had dropped the 19 during the 1950s -- wouldnít the computer still open the factory gate at 8:00 A.M. like it always did?  Wouldnít it dump the toxic waste into the cleansing vat at 2:00 P.M. like it always did?  Why would the year matter?  And if it did, wouldnít the experts fix it in advance?  Wouldnít the world leaders in business and finance and armaments and technology insist on it being fixed so that they could continue to make money?

 Surely, I reasoned, this is misplaced concretism, as Joseph Campbell used to characterize fundamentalist interpretations of holy scripture.  In school we were weaned away from religious literalism. Many of us, children of Western Industrial Culture tottering myopically along in a post-modernist purple haze, long for the certainties of Old Time Religion.  A disempowering reliance on  experts  has propped the success-ladder against the ring-pass-not of shallow scientism, as distinguished from science as a path of knowledge.  Now, I suspected,  many of us may unconsciously pin our millennial anxieties on something apparently concrete rather than mystical and disguise our eschatology with a claim that we are coming to the end of time because of a materialist catastrophe.

 In Georgia in 1969 -- disoriented by the cascade of prophecy and gibberish which our teacher, alternately railing against and praising the Western Mystery Tradition, fashioned into platforms for self inspection -- we were told that we would not understand what had happened to us for 25 years.   In 1994 I felt the need to write about our experiences.  Up until then we had kept quiet.  Our teacher had sent us back to Kansas to do what we were born to do.  I had to become a lawyer.  She said we would be of no help to the spiritual hierarchy whom she represented unless we first became responsible for our own lives.  Having mastered that, we might eventually be able to contribute to the positive evolution of consciousness on our planet.

 When I wrote the book of our experiences I simply told the story without attempting an explanation.  I couldnít provide a context.  But by the time it was published, I recognized that the beautiful, mad, dangerous, invigorating, creative chaos which our teacher had plunged us into in 1969 had now spread through the post-modern American cultural landscape.  The experiences of so many individuals caught up in millenarian cults convinced me that one value of our initiation was that 25 years later, toward the end of the century, we would be able to say weíve been here before and didnít go over the deep end and drown.   But we were lucky enough to have a teacher who pulled us out.  What about now?

 Why are so many fixated on the millennium as the end of time?   The precise commencement of the year 2000 is an artifact of the calendar battles of the preceding 1600 years.  Therefore from a cosmogenesis perspective, it seems that nothing spectacular can be expected at 12:01 AM., "2000 years after the advent" unless, I find myself slipping into speculation, the consensus, conscious and unconscious, of millions of minds fixated on that date tilts the tide of time or somehow establishes a significant millennial concordance and coincidental apocalypse.
 

Popular mind

Regardless of mythology and religion, humanity does time itself to the Industrial West.  Such an effect would not imply a metaphysically driven outcome, just a self-fulfilling prophecy.   It doesnít matter that eschatology is being misinterpreted.  Popular mind is mass mind and that is where the gravity -- as distinguished from the abstract philosophy -- is.

 What trickster would tie the collapse of the industrialized world to a mechanical failure programmed into our computer-dependent web to go off at midnight on New Years Eve 2000 AD?  The Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce recently opined that it  happened by inadvertent oversight, but it did happen and we are facing potentially catastrophic consequences.  Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, explained on PBS  that he was one of those programmers.  It never occurred to him that 50 years later their decision would be embedded in a world wide system of computer technology.  They never considered that those calendar-based computers would interpret "00" as the end of time.

 I assume he is telling the truth as to how it was for many of those early developers of computer language.  But why havenít they or their successors been working on re-programming the technology during the last decade or so?  Didnít they realize, as we neared centuryís end, that corrections had to be made?  For Godís sake, isnít he the head of one of the most powerful money cartels in history?  Why didnít he make us wake up to the danger?

 Trickster?  Thatís Mercury, right?  Coyote and Crow? Satan to Job?  The
Hoaxer as the Messenger from Pegasus impinging on Art Bellís familial reality and forcing him temporarily off the air.  As Hidden Meanings  pointed out by email: Pegasus is in the inner brain, not just the sky.  These messages may be playing a new organ, signaling a new universe.  Who knows?  Whoís asking?
 

Too much money

 All this is ridiculous, a friend assures me. The big corporate interests are making too much money off of us peons under the present system of excess, planned obsolescence, radical consumerism, to allow the economy to collapse.

 But it is collapsing, I protest.  Agricultural commodities are at the lowest level in 40 years.  The last of the independent agrarians, fit to feed our nuclear communities during a crisis, are being forced off the farms and into the ghettos.  Apparently the economic robber barons arenít able to stop that.

 Could it be, a shiver of paranoia creeps up my spine, that the International Financiers, the Secret World Masters, the Evil Mentalists, the  Ahrimanic Forces in Weird Alliance with Luciferian Planetary Escape Artists, want a complete collapse?  Clearly they wonít be hurt by a huge economic crash.  They are well fortified and comfortable.  Only the commoners suffer during such times.  The super-rich get richer because all power goes to the controlling elite.  The last resistance is finally crushed.

 Youíre suffering from conspiracy syndrome, I tell myself.  Sober up.  Stand up!  The mess you have is the mess you made.

 I donít believe in a worldwide conspiracy.  But animals do conspire to control.  Governments are full of conspiratorial groupings.  The multinational corporations are dedicated to their goals, very few of which nurture the broader community.  And behind the scenes, even if we donít consider the possibility of  the devilís disposition, throughout history secret societies have manipulated economies to consolidate their own power, often in complete disregard of the interests of the common person.
 

Out of kilter

 Bad people do bad things.  Extremely powerful bad people could see an  advantage in world-wide temporary collapse.  They might allow that to happen.  They might even believe that they are good people and that although the interim experience, from the viewpoint of the common person, will be devastating, the sacrifice is worth it in order to readjust various out-of-kilter facets of the industrial complex.

 Isnít that what hard-nosed reformers preach for the former Soviet Union?  Isnít that what some of us homeboys are saying about the coming earth changes and the time of troubles while, meantime, weíre trying to make ourselves as comfortable as possible?

  So Iím not sure what is going on.  Or what has ever gone on.  His story is never Her story.  His story has been written by the victors, up till now.  Invention of written records corresponds to the rise of the Patriarchy.   The Church, Bride of the Christ, preaches patience.  Reward awaits us in the next life.  Of course the Prelates get rewarded now, too.  Creationist theologians are silenced.  Liberationists are massacred with the Indians.

 It may be that earth is a staging ground, a school through which we pass, a place of pilgrimage which is not intended to be improved or nurtured into communal splendor for all us relations.  We do kill in order to live.  We eat until we die.  We cooperate, but with few eccentric exceptions, cooperation never goes beyond the in-group, those upon whom my security depends.

 A good joke?  A positive hoax as in hocus-pocus, the conjuring in Revelations which proclaims: "Heaven opened and behold a white horse"?

 We are getting messages.  The magician rides Pegasus from the Source of Memory.   I mean ... whatís going on here?  In Georgia, we worked on re-membering the end of time, on putting the members back together again.  Pegasus, son of Poseidon, is a white  horse, from the sea.  And in the brain, the hippocampus, sea horse, is a white eminence -- the seat of memory, physically and psychically.

 Here are some words which are worlds whirling, worlds without end, wheels within wheels as Ezekiel said.   Then ...

  I stop spinning.  Time to think.  Itís still up to us, as the creatures who create, to take responsibility for what we make.  This is our home.  To build community is to communicate.  Itís time to do better now.  Y2K, as the folks in my group say, stands for Yes to Kindness.  Even if some of the structure fails, even if Iím afraid,  even if thatís what it takes for me to wake -- we still have the opportunity to build a better world.  This is the choice I make.

*******

Jay Bremyer is a lawyer and the author of The Chymical Cook, A True Account of Mystical Initiation, published by Barrytown/ Station Hill, The Dance of Created Lights, A Sufi Tale, published by New Falcon, and Scenes from the Dance of Created Lights, a compact disk recording with Bret Boyer, jazz guitarist and composer,  all available at bookstores and Amazon.com or from bremyer@midusa.net.