A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

"When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted. . . . It was he who freed the first of us, taught us the truth. . . . After he died, the oracle prophesied his return, and that his coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix, end the war, bring freedom to our people. That is why there are those of us who have spent our entire lives searching the Matrix, looking for him. . . . I believe that search is over."



Just as the messianic myths of humanity are helping to shape the emerging contours of twenty-first-century culture, so is our modern interconnected society influencing in turn this most traditional element of our religious heritage. Perhaps at no point was this clearer to me than when I came across an article on the Eastern Lightning sect in Mongolia titled, "Jesus Is Back and She's Chinese." Now that headline is revelatory in more ways than one. Indeed, at what other point in history would it have been possible to have a headline quite the same? We live in a world where two of the most vocal and popular claimants for the mantle of the Second Coming of Christ live not in the Bible Belt of the American South or in any ancient stronghold of Christianity but rather in southern Siberia and in an unknown province of China. Today, we have American gurus from Long Island naming themselves after the Kalki Avatar of Hinduism, Englishmen proclaiming the arrival of Lord Maitreya in North London, and French-American New Age teachers from California making statements such as this one: "I have chosen to reveal Myself to the world. Let it be heralded among all creation and throughout the annals of time that I have come. As the one Jews have long awaited as the Messiah; Christians, as the Second Coming; Buddhists, as the Maitreya—all these am I and by all other names of all other prophecies, henceforth known as Bhagavan Sri Pranananda, clothed in humble, earthly disguise as Louix Dor Dempriey." Whatever the veracity of Mr. Dempriey's claim, one thing is clear: the messianic age has gone global, and today's messiah is no longer constrained by the boundaries of tradition and culture.

So what's the next big thing on the messianic horizon? Christian monk and mystic Brother Wayne Teasdale offered a clue in an interview last January. A passionate activist who is deeply concerned about the potential of human activity to create an ecological apocalypse, Teasdale caught me off guard when he suggested that messianic salvation might ultimately come by the way of . . . extraterrestrial intervention. Yes, believe it or not, the UFO hypothesis has seeped into current discourse regarding all sorts of end times scenarios, some of which place our alleged ET visitors in the role of messianic saviors. After all, didn't the Bible say that the Son of God would "descend from the clouds" when he returned? Benjamin Creme actually started out in this field, spending many years of his life, as he puts it, "working with the UFOs" before he began his involvement with Maitreya. Most of these scenarios tend toward contact of a benevolent sort but there are also those who see something a little more nefarious in the possibilities. I remember an episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation where an alien shows up on a planet and uses advanced technology to pretend to be a mythological figure from the planet's religious culture. Easily convincing the population that she is the "second coming" or their planet's equivalent, this alien is on the verge of controlling the entire population through her charade when Picard, Data, and the rest of the Star Trek posse come to the rescue and stop this extraterrestrial pretender to the messianic mantle. Should we be on the lookout for something similar? For example, what if our Times Square messiah was actually coming to you live not from London but straight from the dark side of the moon, with plans for planetary domination? How would you know the difference? Let's play the scenario out a little further. How hard would it really be for some clever extraterrestrial, with highly advanced technology, to convince Pat Robertson and his millions of fellow believers that he or she or it was just off the bus from heaven ready to rule in the new age?

As fascinating as it can be to speculate about such scenarios, there are some for whom these questions take on a more urgent tone. For example, Stephen Greer, whose National Press Club event on the subject of UFOs made network news a couple of years ago, takes a darker but no less bizarre view of what we might call "extraterrestrial eschatology." He fears that there are those in our military "who share a certain bizarre eschatological bent: a dark view of the future, featuring an extraterrestrial Armageddon—or at least the threat of it." Such a theme, he maintains, "supports retrograde and fanatical religious causes, as well as deeply covert military-industrial plans to expand the arms race into space."

While most of this theorizing starts on the fringe and quickly goes much further out into the vast netherworlds of endless internet conspiracy, it is noteworthy that some respected individuals are actually considering these kinds of hypotheses. And for those of you who do think that all of this sounds quite mad, I would only ask if you've read the Book of Revelation lately. Indeed, from a certain point of view these propositions are hardly more speculative, wild, and unsupported than the idea that the Son of God, who was crucified and resurrected, will come again in human form, fight the antichrist beast that will rise from the ocean, walk upon the earth, and save us all from a divinely induced apocalypse. In the end, perhaps it all comes down to the same question the Hebrews were no doubt asking themselves thousands of years ago as the first predictions filtered through their local culture, the first wild speculations that their future might bring the coming of a great messiah, and a disastrous apocalypse. How do we tell, they must have asked themselves, who is the prophet and who is just plain crazy? Now it's thousands of years into the future, and we're still asking ourselves the same question. Yeats quote on p.130 from the poem "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats, appearing in The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, Richard J. Funneran, Ed., (Scribner, 2nd Revision ed., September 19, 1996), p.140; Reagan quote p.134 excerpted from Paul Boyer's When Time Shall Be No More: Prophesy Belief in Modern American Culture (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 1992), p.142; Hal Lindsey quote on p. 135 from the film (on videotape) The Late Great Planet Earth (Western Front Ltd, Palos Verdes, CA, 1976); Edgar Cayce quote on p.136, from Reading #3976-15, given on January 19, 1934 (www.geocities.com/Athens/5692/earth.htm, 2003); Bob Dylan quote on p. 137 from "When He Returns," by Bob Dylan, from the album Slow Train Coming (Columbia Records, 1979); Alice Bailey quote on p.13 from Alice Bailey's The Externalization of the Hierarchy, Section III: Forces Behind the Evolutionary Process, May 1941 (beaksund.helloyou.ws/netnews/bk-/ externalization/exte1121.html, 2003); Maimonides quote on p.140 from Mishneh Torah; Schneerson quote p.142 from Simon Jacobson, Toward a Meaningful Life: The Wisdom of the Sages (William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), p. 295; Buddha quote on p.142 from Anagata-Vamsa, (www.bci.org/prophecy-fulfilled/founders.htm, 2003); Krishnamurti letter quote p. 143 from Pupul Jayakar, Krishnamurti: A Biography (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1986), p. 37; Jimmy Carter quote p.145 from Jimmy Carter, "Just War - or a Just War?" New York Times Op-Ed, March 9, 2003; Matrix quote on p.146 from the film, Matrix (Warner Bros., 1999); Greer quote p.147 from www.disclosureproject.org/disclosureserves.html, 2003; "Jesus Christ" quote on page 148 from Steve Baxter as Jesus Christ in the film, The Second Coming (Red Production Company, 1999).