Friends,
God did not create Adam and Eve. The quest for God was sparked and funked forward onto this Earth by the first orgasm shared by the first man and woman.“Oh God! I’m coming!”
And heaven came to earth.
Before the afterglow of naughty bits-full blissful sex gave birth to the religious quest, Adam and Eve also discovered that copulating makes one hungry. In the after-f*ck comes feast.
There is no more important catalyst for a breakdown or a breakthrough for civilization than how we manage the future of food. This is the seventh month of the year 2011, when expected to be born is the seven billionth child. He or she will be hungry, demanding of the future a handout of dream it will not fulfill. He or she will grow up pretty damned angry if dreamy entitlement of Garden of Eden dreams are not delivered, if Satan’s apple is already wormy to the cruddy core before tempted. Seven million people and counting will chase after the car of success. They will all “catch it”, sometime in the 2020s, because the car had ran out of gas.
Food is fuel for nourishing thoughts that spark plug flash-forward the engine of enterprise, genius, golden ages. Our future advances on what we eat.
Back on 22 September 2009, Ingrid Weithers-Barati of Raw Epicurean.net interviewed me about the future of food, vegan and vegetarianism, my encounter with Timothy Leary and the recipes of Nostradamus. Many of you may not be aware that Nostradamus was not as obsessed with the future as we think he was. He had many passions to which far more time and years were dedicated, such as being a 16th-century gourmet. He shared his recipes for meals, medicines and fruit preservatives in highly popular books standing for their own part as important examples of French 16th-century literature, beyond those works of prophecy most of us dispute or defend about the future of the world. Nostradamus’ predictions often dwell on the dangers of a future humanity that fails, two out of every three people, taken down by pestilences and most of all by famine. This is a warning to change and not a fate to which we must submit.
But first, let’s eat some future food for thought:
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In this interview, John Hogue shares with us how he became a “rogue” prophecy scholar, his mentors, his thoughts on a plant-based diet, other prophets, like Nostradamus’ culinary passion, John’s other interests, and much more.
Ingrid Weithers-Barati: Tell us a bit about your background What inspired you to become the “rogue” prophecy scholar you are today?
John Hogue: Since being a young boy, I have been an old man growing younger as the body ages. Back then I had a fascination with current events and the repetition of history like a doctor is fascinated with pathology. I wanted to understand “why” history kept repeating itself, and I had an instinctive skepticism of what teachers and authorities taught, because if they really knew what they were talking about, why has humanity not learned history’s lessons. Do we repeat mistakes because we do not learn from history, or, do those who teach us teach the wrong conclusions about history’s lessons? (A very serious young boy, there.)
Anyway, when it started getting too serious I fell into an existential crisis by the time I was in my 20s. So, I began searching for spiritual and religious answers, especially those less orthodox or more Eastern than those I was indoctrinated to follow as a being labeled “Western Caucasian American” stamped on the bum side of my soul. In the process of studying religious paths, I became aware of the prophetic scriptures of the world. It seemed “future history” was just as plagued as the past with patterns of conditioned habits. The future seemed just as repetitively tragic as the past. So, as I embarked since 1980 on the path of meditation on the side was this continued evolution of my study of what made people predictable in the past and predictable in the future.
My work is all about understanding the engine of conditioning each new generation to be as silly and miserable as the past, no matter what the color or design of the cultural or religious blinders put upon the inner eye of their souls as “truth.”
Thus, my iconoclastic experiential slant on prophecy is perhaps unique among prophecy scholars. That is why I am known as a “Rogue Scholar”.
Over the past 30 years, I must have studied enough on my own to become a Rhodes Scholar but I attained no degrees, short of the minimum requirement — a high school diploma — in 1974. More than this degree in society’s de-education of my intelligence was too much to bear. The price for a further dulling of intelligence required I assume deeper degrees of BS, BMs, and ‘piled high and deep’ PhDs of borrowed knowledge.
IWB: Who is/are/were your mentors[s]?
JH: Existence is first and foremost the mentor of us all. It is life itself. There were many others and still many more coming. Ray Bradbury taught me how to write. My meditation teacher, Osho, still teaches me before and beyond the grave to be aware of the witnessing consciousness that abides all changes in the body-mind and to celebrate living as a Zorba the Buddha in the marketplace of a constantly changing and impermanent world we all share. He taught me to be a witness of these things, and more: To be aware of that which is beyond what consciousness reflects. For that I cannot limit my answer in mere words. At a point one must stop talking about H2O and jump into the water. Meditation techniques are a way to prepare for real meditation. Those who want to know more than what I’ve said here must come and meditate with me.
IWB: When did you become a vegetarian, and what motivated you to do so?
JH: I was 25 years old. I was motivated by practicality, not anything holy-baloney “spiritual.” I discovered after a first quarter century of living in this body that it didn’t like animal flesh of any kind. Once I stopped eating it I became a hale and hearty high-energy fellow ever since.
IWB: What are your thoughts on consuming a plant-based diet and the role it plays on the health of our environment?
JH: First off, a word about dietary spiritual conceits. From my experience, vegetarianism does not make you more spiritually evolved. Case in point, Adolf Hitler tried all his life to be a vegetarian while Jesus Christ ate meat.
There are many people, born of Western bodies, who try to claim some spiritual attainment by eating Vegan or Veg. at the cost of making themselves less energetic, unhealthy and mentally dull. I will tell you right now, as a Vegan now for four years, who eats eggs, if at any moment my body impresses upon me the need to eat fish, chicken, lamb, or beef I will do it without hesitation or any spiritual guilt. What is good for Gurdjieff or Muhammad, or all the Sufi mystics, many of the Zen masters, or even poor ole Jesus left hanging around as some lamb sacrifice of God is good for me too.
Now, with that said, my own experience agrees with my own teacher, Osho. About six months after I quit eating meat, fish or chicken I felt a glugginess leave my bodily and nervous system. I felt a lighter quality in my body-mind. I did feel less gross, more sensitive. Moreover, in my case I got physically stronger. I mean, if big 800-pound, muscle bound, chest thumping gorillas can eat bunny-fare and be that big and strong that means there are some animal and human animal people that have bodies like those veggorillas. I’m one of those plant-gorging apes for sure, for now.
Certainly adopting a vegetarian, even vegan, lifestyle lowers my carbon footprint, but let that not prevent people from eating a modest meat diet from time to time if their body needs it. We can still vastly reduce the wasteful farming and green house gas flatulating herds of livestock to help Mother Earth if people simply approach their eating habits in a balanced and intelligent way. Most affluent people simply eat too much, including those who graze like rabbits as proud veggie folk.
IWB: How has vegetarianism contributed to your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being?
JH: I’m not a vegetarian anymore. I am now a Vegan who eats two eggs a day. (Thank you, Chickens of the world!) As I said answering your last question, I definitely grew stronger and less slickly and prone to immune weakness after becoming a veggie guy. The question is, was this improvement solely from becoming a Vegetarian at 25?
It is hard to know because at 25 I also went to India, became initiated as a swami in the Neo-Sannyasin “non-tradition” of Osho. Before this, I started meditating. Therefore, since I like what chickens make, we have a chicken-or-the-egg Zen koan here. Did the diet make me a meditator, or did the meditation make me a vegetarian?
Osho.
There have been great mystics and meditators that have not been vegetarians, so one must wonder? Also, psychosomatic issues might equally have caused the chronic problems I had with my upper and lower GI until I stopped eating meat. Osho’s active meditation techniques and encounter groups put me on the fast track of letting go 25 years of repressed emotions, fears and judgments. We hold things in our bodies.
Osho’s says, “start with the body” in meditation. It sure worked for me. Does therefore my vegetarianism-cum-veganism become a happy extra to this cleansing? Did my psychosomatic bouts of intestinal blockage end because I stopped eating hamburgers? On the other hand, was it the rebirthing session that got me in contact with the life in Napoleon’s army in 1812, at the Battle of Borodino? I received an artillery shell splinter in the gut while on my horse directing a corps of French cavalry into a ravine for cover from cannon in a large Russian breastwork that was rolling my troupers and their horses over like bowling pins for two hours. When wounded in the gut, I calmed my horse. Everyone around me watched as I yelled beau feu! (good shot!) and dropped dead.
Reincarnation studies show that people seem to carry health issues related to traumas in past lives. Once I saw how I died on the battlefield, I never had intestinal “infortitude” ever since (I’m in my 54th year in this body. Update that to 56th year at the time of posting this blog). Was it the veggie diet or was it breaking the unconscious psychosomatic connection a past life bowel injury that killed?
IWB: Would you day eating this way contributes greatly to your meditation practice and your ability to foretell future events?
JH: I heard Osho say that vegetarianism makes one on the path more escthetic, less gross and dense. My life path experiences would tend to agree with him; however, if at some point this body should need animal products beyond chicken eggs we will put that theory to the test.
I am very surprised how good I feel after I stopped eating dairy products. I was a major cheese eater as a vegetarian, by the way. I do not see myself going back to cheese or meat in the foreseeable future, but one must listen to the body, as it always needs new things. Osho has a meditation for “talking to the body” which I find very helpful
(Insert: if any of you want to receive information about this and other meditation techniques, Contact Me.)
IWB: Are there any particular types of food, plant-based or otherwise, that can impede your abilities?
JH: Weed. Alcohol. “Silly”-sybens perhaps, although every time in my youth when I was lining up to try the latter I would practice a week of cleansing my body for the best initiatory event. My friends, though, could not wait and consumed them before the week was out.
It all depends. These vegetarian “foods” can aid one, loosen one up, give one a glimpse but a glimpse does not a lifetime of bliss or augury make. For that you can’t knock it back, toke or mushroom your self 24/7 over seventy years like Timothy Leary, who I saw a few months before he died, sitting to the side of the book store area of a Seattle Whole Life Expo in the 1990s, to which I was invited to lecture.
My eyes were pulled to regard this spent and wrinkled candy wrapper of a man, shrunk in his chair. I did not even recognize him at first. It was a visceral moment. Our eyes met. Mine must have conveyed wordlessly the feeling of concern for and a marveling at how this stranger looked physically and spiritually spent. This impression registered in reflection in his eyes and he cowered. Then it dawned in a flash who it was I had regarded in the gap of no-thought was Timothy Leary.
I turned away, embarrassed to have stared, but not sorry to have felt a truth conveyed innocently through me, to him.
Drugs had destroyed Timothy Leary in the name of artificial enlightenment.
You have to find the inner high free of all chains or ticklers for the body-mind.
I mean, what inebriate was available to my consciousness before I was born? What will be available to imbibe when this body-mind imbiber is ash?
The fundamental question is, “who” is having the high? Who is not having a high?
Any dependence on something through the body for expanded consciousness is a path to addiction. There are far more subtle and profound addictions from which we all suffer. For instance, the identification with body-mind and emotions that leads us repeatedly into a cycle of lives lived in ego’s Misery-field.
Food for thought? Or, is the answer something untouched by any food or thought?
***
In Part Two of this September 2009 interview, we will delve into the recipes of the galloping gourmet of the 16th century, Michel de Nostradamus, who on his many travels on mule-back across France, Spain and Italy, picked up more than magical tools and powers but developed a sophisticated pallet.
John Hogue
(09 July 2011)
The creeping coup of corporates taking over the US Democracy… The US Supreme Court’s rulings accurately foreseen going against the middle class… The possibility of Democrats and Tea Party Republicans becoming strange bedfellows in a sweeping tax reform in Washington… The Obama Birther controversy becoming a national issue on the floors of Congress… The economy stalling within the first six months of this year, entering a new crisis… All of the above and much more about the year 2011 was predicted and postmarked on the winter solstice of last year. Read what is coming in the second half of this year. Check out Predictions for 2011.
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