Our Timeless Connection With Prophets and Prophecies

Prophecy: What the Future Holds For You
by Sylvia Browne, Lindsay Harrison

(Page 2 of 3)

It is our nature to want to know what the future holds. From the moment we first began to inhabit this earth in human form, we've believed that forewarned is forearmed, and we've sought out those who seem to have a clearer view of the road ahead than we do. On a small scale, we don't want to get caught in the rain without an umbrella, but we also wouldn't mind knowing whether or not we should save that rainwater for an upcoming drought or man-made crisis. On a much larger scale, we want to know that we personally, we as a community, we as a faith, as a society, as a nation or as a surprisingly fragile planet are going to be okay and, more to the point, what "okay" is going to look like. We look to prophets and prophecies not just for warnings but also for hope and for comfort, no matter how far in the distance they might be. And because we've been fooled before, and/or not paying attention, and/or too naive or greedy or in too much of a hurry to always rely on our own judgment, we explore prophecies in search of a blueprint for discerning the real from the counterfeit, the truth from the lies, the heroes from the villains, meaningful road signs from time- and soul-wasting detours and, probably most essential of all, the genuinely God-centered from the countless clever pretenders.

The Cultural Bond of Prophecy

One of the countless aspects of prophets and prophecies that has always fascinated me is that they've always been traditional and fundamental to civilizations throughout the world, even the most ancient, isolated cultures who had no interest in or means of communicating with each other. It's not as if the Aborigines of Australia heard that predicting the long-range future had become very popular among American Indians and decided to give it a try, or the Mayans only started coming up with prophecies so they wouldn't be outdone by those Egyptian prophets they kept hearing about. Cultures tend to express the most deep-rooted essences of their people, and each of these cultures, so vastly different in so many ways, has demonstrated, separately and together, that we're eternally united as human beings around the world in our insistence that the future is knowable.

Of course, the future is knowable, and I'll explain in Chapter 3 exactly why that is. That fact alone, and our universal agreement that it's true, should bring us more peace than it does. Who's "good at" and "bad at" foreseeing the future, and which information is accurate and which isn't, is almost beside the point when it comes to simply appreciating how dearly held our global yearning to look ahead really is. It would be impossible to explore the prophecies of every culture that ever existed, or that exists today, but I want to highlight just a few, hoping that as you read them you'll focus on the respectful purity of spirit at their core, no matter what corner of the world they came from.

The American Indians

A friend of mine was involved in a recent documentary about native American Indians. The film crew shot for a couple of weeks, capturing great footage of several generations of the tribes they were focused on, their rituals, their daily lives, their traditions and ceremonies, their relationships within families and within the tribe, and the extent to which "civilization" had irreversibly seeped into their lives.

As wonderful as the footage and the camera work were, though, and as mesmerizing as that collage of brown, beautiful faces from ages one year old to a hundred were to watch, the producers and the director realized that their film was still missing something, some special element that would set it apart from every other documentary ever done about the American Indian. As a solution, someone came up with the idea of giving a camera to the Indians themselves and letting them shoot some footage, so the makers of the documentary could really get a look at life through the eyes of the subjects of their film. And that's exactly what they did. A week later the producers and director found themselves gaping, with chagrin at first, at the results of their bright idea: a coyote's pawprints in a muddy riverbank, a wisp of white fur caught in a broken branch, a hawk circling, an aura around a full moon, an approaching thunderstorm, a bear catching fish in a waterfall, a wolf loping across a hill-hour after hour of footage, and not for one second was there so much as a glimpse of a human being.

What they finally edited together was a gorgeous documentary and eloquent, simple proof of what's been written about American Indians for thousands of years: ask them to tell you their story and they'll tell you about Nature.

Of course, the many tribes of the native American nations each have their own distinct language, customs and cherished legacy of prophecies. But even their prophecies reflect their reverence for this earth and our essential spiritual connection to it, without which humankind can't and won't survive. One of the most beautiful examples is an excerpt from a Lakota prophecy. It refers to the Star People, whom many tribes believe to be their ancient extraterrestrial ancestors, and to the Sacred Mother, who is the earth:

In the next decade, the Star People that you call meteorites will come to this earth in answer to the Mother's call for help. You see, we are all relations. So the Star People are beings, and they are the planets, and the other bodies in the heavens as well.

The Sacred Mother is screaming for life and the meteorites will hear her cries and answer her call for help. They will hit the earth from the heavens with such force that many internal things will happen as well as external. The earth will move as a result of the impact. This will cause the sacred fire that is the source of all life to the Mother to move through her body.

The rains will change their fall and the winds will alter their course and what has existed for three hundred years will no longer exist. And where there is summer, there will be fall. And where there is fall, there will be winter. And where there is winter, there will be spring.

The animals and plants will become confused. There will be great plagues that you do not understand. Many of these plagues are born from your scientists whose intentions have gone awry. Your scientists have let these monsters loose upon the land. These plagues will spread through your waters and through your blood and through your food because you have disrupted the natural chain through which your Mother cleanses herself.

Only those who have learned to live on the land will find sanctuary. Go to where the eagles fly, to where the wolf roams, to where the bear lives. Here you will find life because they will always go to where the water is pure and the air can be breathed. Live where the trees, the lungs of this earth, purify the air. There is a time coming, beyond the weather. The veil between the physical and the spiritual world is thinning.

And this came from Brave Buffalo of the Brule Sioux Nation:

It is time for the Great Purification. We are at a point of no return. The two-legged are about to bring destruction to life on earth. It's happened before, and it's about to happen again. The Sacred Hoop shows how all things go in a circle. The old becomes new; the new becomes old. Everything repeats. White people have no culture. Culture is having roots in the earth. People without culture don't exist very long because Nature is God. Without a connection to Nature, the people drift, grow negative, destroy themselves. In the beginning we had one mind, and it was positive, a thing of beauty, seeing beauty everywhere.

The Aborigines

Half a world away from the American Indians, and very probably unaware of their existence, the Australian Aborigines are thought to have been on this earth for more than eighteen thousand generations. From their ancient beginnings they've been nomadic hunters and gatherers, traveling and living in clans, orally passing their culture and traditions along from one generation to the next to the next to the next. They revere Nature and their elders, they're intensely connected to both the practical and the spiritual sides of their lives, and they embrace a gorgeous mythology called the "Dreamtime" that lies at the heart of their belief system.

The Dreamtime, which is woven through Aboriginal lives in a variety of daily applications, is at its core their treasured account of that time when their spirit ancestors moved through the bare, unsanctified land and gave it its physical form and its sacred laws. There was the Rainbow Serpent who slithered across the world creating rivers and valleys with its massive body. Bila was the sun woman whose fire lit the world. She was destroyed by two lizardlike creatures called Kudna and Muda, who, frightened by the darkness they'd brought about by killing Bila, began hurling boomerangs into the sky in all directions, trying to bring back the light. Kudna's boomerang flew into the eastern sky and a brilliant ball of fire appeared, which slowly crossed the sky and vanished again beyond the western horizon, and day and night were born. The countless spirits and stories are the exquisite foundation on which the Aborigines build their reverent awe of all of Nature and their belief that it is humankind's privilege to live among and serve such hallowed creations.

Dreamtime is a tangible reality of the Aboriginal past, present and future. It isn't something that happened a very long time ago and was completed, it's an ongoing consciousness and responsibility with tragic consequences if it's ignored. A prophecy from an Australian Aboriginal Tribal Elder named Guboo Ted Thomas, orally preserved until it was committed to writing, reflects their profoundly simple faith:

I was in Dreamtime.
I see this great wave going.
I tell people about this wave.
It wasn't a tidal wave.
This was a spiritual wave.
So, to me, I believe that the Dreamtime is going to be that.
I believe the revival is going to start in Australia when we're Dreaming.
It's the hummingbee that I'm talking about.
And love.
We've got to learn to love one another.
You see, that's really what's going to happen to the earth.
We're going to have tidal waves.
We're going to have earthquakes.
That's coming because we don't consider this land as our Mother.
We've taken away the balance, and we're not putting back.
I look at the bush, and those trees are alive.
They're not dead, they're alive.
And they want you to cuddle them.

The Incas

Thousands of miles from the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines, the ancient Inca civilization evolved on the South American continent. The origins of the Incas are a mystery, primarily recorded through the oral legacy of a people whose world was destroyed and whose vast wealth was pirated by Spanish conquistadors in 1532.

At its most powerful, the Inca Empire was the largest nation on earth, stretching 2500 miles along the Andes Mountains. They were artisans, hunters, gatherers, farmers and incredibly gifted builders and engineers, constructing more than fourteen thousand miles of roads before such a thing as the wheel even existed, roads built for foot travel but so time- and weather-resistant that some of them are still virtually intact today. Also still intact today, and marveled over by visitors from around the world, are Inca pyramids, temples, observatories and some structures that were never finished, mute reminders of lives interrupted forever and a brilliant civilization thrown aside for power and greed.

Nature formed the heart of the Inca language and the Inca religion as well. The Incas believed that all creation in nature was the work of the Sun God, and they considered themselves to be descendants of the Sun. They held festivals at the end of every harvest season to thank the Sun God for their bountiful crops or to pray for better crops in the season ahead, and at the solstices when the earth and the Sun are at their farthest from each other, the Incas held ceremonies to ask the Sun God not to leave his children. They believed in reincarnation and even carried the mummies of revered ancestors to the holiest of rituals so their ancestors could share the events with them.

After the Inca civilization was destroyed in the 1500s, a small tribe of refugees called the Q'ero escaped to isolated villages in the high Andes. They've lived there ever since, with the Q'ero elders and shamans passing along the Inca language, history, traditions and prophecies to five hundred years of descendants.

The Western world's first actual sighting of the Q'ero villages didn't happen until 1955. Communication between the Westerners and the Q'ero evolved from there, and in 1996 a tribal leader, the head shaman and other Q'ero elders honored the United States with a historic visit in which, among other shared knowledge and rituals, they passed along the prophecies of their revered Inca ancestors. Those prophecies read, in part:

The new caretakers of the Earth will come from the West, and those that have made the greatest impact on Mother Earth now have the moral responsibility to remake their relationship with her, after remaking themselves.

The prophecy holds that North America will supply the physical strength, or body; Europe will supply the mental aspect, or head; and the heart will be supplied by South America. The prophecies are optimistic.

They refer to the end of time as we know it-the death of a way of thinking and a way of being, the end of a way of relating to nature and to the earth.

In the coming years, the Incas expect us to emerge into a golden age, a golden millennium of peace.

The prophecies also speak of tumultuous changes happening in the earth, and in our psyche, redefining our relationships and spirituality.

The next pachacuti, or great change, has already begun, and it promises the emergence of a new human after this period of turmoil.

To which the Q'ero shamans added in closing:

Follow your own footsteps.
Learn from the rivers,
the trees and the rocks.
Honor the Christ,
the Buddha,
your brothers and sisters.
Honor your Earth Mother and the Great Spirit.
Honor yourself and all of creation.
Look with the eyes of your soul and engage the essential.

Three timeless civilizations, each a part of the earth's earliest fabric but existing so far from one another, in such remote isolation, that they might as well have lived on different planets. And those ancient civilizations, like too many others to elaborate on here, obviously shared certain common needs that extended far beyond food, clothing and shelter:

  a need to believe in a Force greater than themselves

  a need to understand their relationship with the natural world around them

  a need to formulate prophecies, and then embrace them as such an essential
      part of their culture that they passed them like treasured heirlooms from one
      generation to the next

It may be even more fascinating, though, that those three very separate, isolated societies searched the land, the stars, the rivers, the sun, their own souls, wherever they thought their answers came from, and arrived at prophecies that all added up to the same identical conclusion: humankind's sole hope for sustaining the privilege of life on this earth is through its constant, humble, reverent connection to its own spirituality.

Three remote civilizations, one prophetic conclusion.

It's enough to make you believe those prophecies might all have been coming from the very same Source.

Copyright 2004 by Sylvia Browne. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Sylvia Browne is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Other Side and Back and Adventures of a Psychic. A working psychic for nearly fifty years, Ms. Browne has appeared on The Montel Williams Show, Sally Jessy Raphael, Larry King Live, Unsolved Mysteries, CNN, and Entertainment Tonight.