Laura said:
Q: (L) Okay… Ark was saying he was reading some predictions that there's going to be a bloody future for the US and not a very good future for France either. We'll have to find the article.
{Article located at: http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/2009/12/2010-saga-continues.html }
A: Didn't we say "5D city on a hill"?
[snip]
(Anart) Is it a specific city that will be a "5D city on a hill"? Can we know?
A: Think big!
Q: (Joe) A big city?
(P*****) Big Apple? New York?
(A***) Capital city?
(Allen) Or more than just a city!
(Joe) Well, the US is the City on the Hill. Are we talking cosmic catastrophe here?
A: Eventually, yes.
Thanks Laura and everybody - this transcript is really encouraging.
Thinking about the "city on the hill", I was wondering about the phrase the C's used: "Think big!"
Joe says the US itself is the City on the Hill. If you go back far enough, the background to this is in the Gospel of Matthew, where it crops up in the Sermon on the Mount (5:14). In the Synoptic Gospels this phrase is unique to Matthew, and it doesn't seem to be part of the underlying Q stratum. In a way it is, though, an amplification of something in Q on true enlightenment. And this is where it all got a bit screwy: Q was referring to the true enlightenment of a person:
QS33 (Luke 11:33-36) said:
Jesus said, "No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel basket, but on a lampstand. And those in the house see the light. The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is good your whole body will be full of light." (Mack, Burton, "The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins", p.92)
So Q - or at least a possible secondary stratum of Q (Q2) in the textual transmission - sees the light as referring to something that lights up the whole person. Matthew has given the light another reference: as something which shines from the person or group to other people not yet so enlightened. So even by Matthew's time, the reference had been twisted all out of shape. He says:
Matthew 5:14 said:
Jesus said, "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid."
The "city" here immediately makes you think of a community, or even a political set-up. For early Christian bishops, this idea is perhaps much more palatable than ideas of a growing light in the body of an esoteric seeker: it gave the Church a reason for expansion, for missionary activity - and even for its blessing on the military expansion of a Christian State.
And this is the sense in which it was understood by the Puritan founding fathers of the United States. Apparently, in 1630, on board the ship
Arbella, en route to New England, John Winthrop had preached about the particular aim of these colonists. This sermon (called the
City upon a Hill sermon, or
A Model of Christian Charity) is often seen in American mythology as setting out the point of the colony - the raison d'etre of the whole American enterprise. As such it's been referenced numerous times, most famously by JFK, and then by Ronald Reagan. It's perhaps a forerunner of the idea of American exceptionalism: the idea that the US occupies a special niche among the nations of the world in terms of its national credo, historical evolution, political and religious institutions (as the world's first modern democracy) and unique origins as a nation of immigrants.
Of course, the idea of American exceptionalism is itself based on a lie: the US sees itself as the shining city set on a hill, a beacon to the other nations of the world to become like itself. The idea is self-serving and jingoistic - it suggests that the US as a governmental system is already perfect, and that other nations have a lot of catching up to do before they become as wonderful as the US. It also suggests that the US is somehow impregnable, as a city set on a hill is easily defensible. The US can just lob a few missiles at anyone with the temerity to approach it - shoot first, ask questions later. It also, of course, suggests a siege-mentality on the part of the US. The city set on a hill has to have enemies at the gate in order to justify its existence as an isolated city-state, in order to keep it together as a political unity. A pretty sad state of affairs all round, and very similar, imo, to the way of thinking found in the Israeli political-military establishment.
John Winthrop had actually argued that there were dangers in being a city on a hill. He said:
John Winthrop said:
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken... we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God... We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a-going.
It could be said that Winthrop, right at the outset, made a pretty clear prediction of the transition of the city on a hill from 3D to 5D. Which must be of some credit to him - he could probably see from the outset that the whole thing was going to be a failure right from the start, which it has. Since 1630 there have been plenty of prayers "turned into curses" - from native Americans to indentured servants to African slaves, and so on. The whole affair was founded on the idea of treating other sections of the society as not actually part of the city on the hill, but as hewers of wood and drawers of water, who served without freedom or proper recompense - or whose land and resources were taken and fenced off for the exclusive use of its white Christian citizens. Globalization today only extends that model to encompass the whole world, with the US at the centre.
With the city set on a hill, for all to see, the hypocrisy of the model only becomes more glaringly obvious. But this has been going on for a long time - it's not just confined to the United States. And since the C's are asking us to "think big", perhaps we can go further.
Archaeologically speaking, the very first city on a hill was actually deep down in a valley, 200 metres below sea level. At Jericho, in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period, round about 8000-7000 BCE, a vast settlement was built unlike anything ever seen in Western Asia before. The town covered about ten acres (about four hectares), and was surrounded with a deep ditch and massive stone wall. The whole affair was spectacular, and so unusual in the light of everything going on around it at that time, that it was actually quite freakish. Bizarre, you might call it. Although it was deep down in the Jordan valley, it formed a hill because of the successive building levels from about 9250 BCE onwards. When a building reached a point of imminent collapse, it was levelled and a new house built on its remains, and so the whole town rose to form a hill - in Arabic, a "tell" or ruin-mound. In Western Asia there are still thousands of these tells which are pretty obvious to anyone standing in open country and looking around. Dating from much later points in history, they just rise up out of the surrounding plain - but Jericho was the first.
At Jericho round about 8000 BCE the building pattern suddenly shifts, from rather flimsy wattle and daub dwellings, to houses made of bricks on stone foundations. Today we just take bricks as fairly obvious things, but at Jericho they were a new invention. As were the defensive structures: a ditch cut into rock, two metres deep and 8.5 metres wide, within which a stone wall was built, 1.6 metres thick, and preserved to a height of four metres, with a brick superstructure of unknown height. Within the wall was a great stone tower, more than eight metres high - and perhaps there were others dotted around the edges of the town. No one knows why this city was built, but it seems likely that agriculture had something to do with it:
James Mellaart said:
The early developments in Palestine may be the result of the natural occurrence of wild wheat and barley in that country.
Trade too seems to have been crucially important here:
James Mellaart said:
Jericho was well situated for commercial enterprise; it commanded the resources of the Dead Sea, salt, bitumen and sulphur, all useful products in early societies. Obsidian, nephrite and other greenstones from Anatolia, turquoise matrix from Sinai and cowries from the Red Sea have been found in the remains of the town, only a fraction of which was excavated.
Exclusion of others, resources for trade, and the growing and eating of nice gluten-rich wheat and barley. Probably these Jerichoans really thought they were something special. They lasted a lot, lot longer than the US has done. But they went into 5D all the same. The site was deserted round about 7000 BCE before a new lot of people (PPNB) took over the site, with a completely new stone industry. Of course, something of the same old pattern remained. Wheat- and barley-growing was now the norm - the society was based on grubbing a subsistence from the soil. Other Neolithic systems had no use for cities like this - or the other accoutrements of "civilisation". Probably because they were more sophisticated sociologically and technologically.
So maybe what the C's are suggesting when they say, "Think big!", is a complete break with the past. It's the end of a society dominated by cities, from Jericho (the original city on a tell) to the US (with its governmental system based on repression and exploitation, while pretending to some sort of supernatural glory and destiny - the shining city on a hill). Pretty hopeful, really.
At least, so I'm guessing at the moment.