Revelation, Part 2

"I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream? And you would of course be able to alter your time sense, and slip seventy-five years of subjective time into eight hours of sleep. You would I suppose start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life: love affairs, banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, and music beyond belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing at seventy-five years a night, you’d be getting a little taste for something different, and you’d move over to an adventurous dimension, where there were certain dangers involved, and the thrill of dealing with dangers. And you could rescue princesses from dragons, and go on dangerous journeys, and eventually get into contests with enemies. And after you had done that for awhile, you’d think up a new wrinkle, to forget that you were dreaming, and think that is was all for real." - Alan Watts

In ages past, the civilized and the uncivilized alike seemed to have accepted the presence of the enlightened as something of a necessity. The bible is fraught with these men and women who received visions in hallucinogenic dreams; in many ways, they were an extension of shamanism. Examples include the major and minor prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zecharaiah, Malachi), Elijah, Elisha, Micaiah, John of Patmos, and many, many others, but perhaps most intriguingly suggested by Northrop Frye, our pal Moses (The Great Code 126) (Deuteronomy 34:10). Aaron's priestly functions, Frye says, are distinct and separate from Moses' prophetic ones. Left alone, "Aaron goes wrong and makes human mistakes, the voice of prophecy in itself is conventionally regarded as infallible [that is, Moses]" (Frye 126). According to Frye, the difference between Aaron and Moses is this:

"The wise man thinks of the human situation as a kind of horizontal line, formed by precedent and tradition and extended by prudence: the prophet sees man in a state of alienation caused by his own distractions, at the bottom of the U-shaped curve." (Frye 128)

In class, we discussed the difference between prudential and skeptical wisdom. The wise man Frye describes has prudential wisdom (Proverbs, for example), but the prophet suffers from skeptical wisdom (Book of Ecclesiastes). This is an important distinction. Instead of relying on history, the prophet's main goal isn't to pacify us with words, but to wake us up. James Joyce said, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". Clearly Joyce liked prudential wisdom as much as Sid Vicious did. Today, we have an overabundance of prudence, but a shortage of prophets. Like Polonius told Laertes to avoid "... wine, women, and songs", we are distracted by television, sports, politics, and consumerism/debt, but these are all merely diversions from the truth. There is a blanket (a fog, if you will) placed over our eyes by a group of people trying to control us, and they accomplish this by pacifying us with distractions. We forget who we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. By getting rid of the prophet, we have done a way with our only protection against the ruling class. There is few trying to wake up the citizens of America. Much like Aaron wavered from his duties when Moses went away, so has society. We need the prophet's return. We need to be waken up and the sooner the better. Frye describes metanoia as a "change of outlook or spiritual metamorphosis, an enlarged vision of the dimensions of human life" (Frye 130). We are suffering from a lack of this metanoia.

But where did the prophet go? Northrop Frye describes:

"In the post-Biblical period both Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism seem to have accepted the principle that the age of prophecy had ceased, and to have accepted it with a good deal of relief. Medieval Europe had a High King and a High Priest, an Emperor and a Pope, but the distinctively prophetic third force was not recognized." (Frye 128)

From what we can see from modern examples and artifacts from the past, prophets were accepted by the community uneasily. They made predictions, good and bad omens, had the ability to heal, and 'saw' visions. They were also associated with evil spirits and other foreboding things (as we can see from the Biblical example of the Witch of Endor). However, no matter what society felt about them, the enlightened prophets were an important counter-balance to the ruling class. They were advisers to kings and princes, and though their prophecies were often angrily received (or rejected), the elite realized the importance to their kingdom and court. However, as history progressed, slowly the prophet died away. They were to be replaced by bureaucratic clergy and royalty. Without the prophet, the ruling class and organized religion easily become parasitic, and their only way to continue ruling is by making us believe we need them. One doesn't have to look far in today's society to identify these blood suckers. They are the people that create nothing, yet lord themselves over mankind. Just like religious institutions need to make their followers believe they need them to speak to God, the US government needs to make the citizens believe it needs "it" for protection. If the bible is any guiding point, government is to be looked upon with suspicion. The Kings of Israel weren't established until much later then the prophet and the priest, and even after that, only David and a few later kings seem to exemplify good leaders. In almost every other example, the king is incompetent or unfaithful, and the prophet needs to call him out (the story of Elijah and King Ahab for example). Even David did wrong, including sending Uriah to die in battle so he could steal his wife, Bathsheba.

Ultimately, without the prophets' presence, we have no voice. The religious institutions and the ruling class surely don't want us to wake up, that would endanger their position of power. The genius of the Constitution was that it gave the American citizens the power to fill this void. However, we have become so pacified by our rulers that we are berated for standing up. We are pushed back down. We are laughed at, spit at, scorned. There is no room for the prophet anymore in America. We no longer have great art, but corporate-funded explosion orgies. We no longer have great poetry, great literature, great anything, at least none that is read by the masses. We are blind, and when we are told to do something by our masters, we do it without thinking (poor man or woman who says any differently). Again, this gets back to the main theme of Revelation. The only way to receive a revelation and "see" the world as it really is for the first time is through the prophet.


Northrop Frye describes Apocalypse as "the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared" (Frye 138). Seeing as this is a biblical class, I would like to refer to a movie with a biblical name, "Jacob's Ladder". The film, directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Tim Robbins in the title role of Jacob, deals with a returning Vietnam vet. He sees increasingly bizarre visions as he struggles to deal with the aftermath of war and the death of his son. Some of the more colorful examples include a woman dancing at a party sprouting a slimey tale, and a hospital being filled with the grotesque: a rusty bicycle, men and women in straight jackets, a man banging his head on a wall, strange mutant creatures on the ceiling, blood stained walls, piles of bodiless arms, and perhaps most horrifying of all, the crazed man Jacob has seen throughout the movie violently shaking his head. Jacob's chiropractor, Lewis, is often interpreted as Jacob's guardian angel. According to wikipedia, he cites the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, when he tells Jacob, "Eckhart saw Hell too; he said: 'the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.'" At the end of the movie, we learn it all was a dying vision. Jacob approaches his son Gabe on a stair case and ascends up it. The credits role.

James Joyce's quote, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" is again palpable. Jacob, like all of us, is caught in a dying hallucination. We are trapped in a dream that we cannot awake. The movie is very similar to a short story I read by Ambrose Bierce named "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". The man is going to be hanged, but miraculously escapes into the river below, he swims to safety and narrowly avoids bullets. However, as he tries to return home, he reaches the end of the rope and his neck breaks. The entire escape was his dying vision. Wikipedia has also found another familiar connection, "The film [Jacob's Ladder] is also viewed by many, including the screenwriter, as a modern interpretation of Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead." Frye describes the Tibetan Book of the Dead as such:

"... where the soul is assumed immediately after death to be going through a series of visions, first of peaceful and then of wrathful deities. A priest reads the book of the dead into the ear of the corpse, who is also assumed to hear the reader's voice telling him that all these visions are simply his own repressed mental forms now released by death and coming to the surface. If he could realize that, he would immediately be delivered from their power, because it is his own power" (Frye 137).

We are prisoners not of some terrible force or devil, but our own inner demons and visions. Yes, there is many who love to keep us there, but it is our dream, no one else's. Once we finally come to the terms that we are dead, we will be finally without ego. We will receive Frye's apocalypse; it was there all along. We will wake from the nightmare; we will be free of the world's distractions; we will see the world as it really is; we will have a revelation. "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32).