Was there ever a child, prodigy or not, who when asked said, "I want to grow up to be Cassandra," or, "I want to grow up to be Jeremiah"? Probably not. But for reasons that remain mysterious, some few children, upon growing up, do find those roles thrust upon them. As one such, I opt rather for the Tiresias variant. He largely avoided the self-lacerating bitterness of your classic unheeded prophet. Even blind, he seemed content to go about reporting his clear visions of world past and world future, caring hardly a whit about how people reacted to his often unsettling, sometimes outrageous reports. (Tiresias, for example, got to be the person who informed Oedipus that the woman he'd married was his mother.) That in every generation the genetic or karmic pool throws up (a carefully chosen verb, that) such irritating prophetic variants is difficult to deny. Like it or not, seers we shall always have with us. There’s just one problem. You can’t find them. They find you. At best, you may stumble across one on your way to elsewhere. Think of Oedipus trekking about, more or less minding his own business, quite unaware of the true nature of his business, and here comes Tiresias to let the karmic cat out of the bag. But, whether you are media mogul or political poseur, if you set out looking for a hit of futuristic advice, you may be sure that you will not find a smidgen of 100% product. Which means you’re probably better off sticking to the roll of dice or whatever. What, you say, you mean in this age of omnipresent presence, where every person on the planet is locatable, knowable, and either online or soon to be online, there are people running around who know the future and we, masters of our digital destiny, can’t find them? Surely you jest. This age, for all it’s diverting qualities, suffers from a level of chronism no less than that of any other age. Chronism: the belief that, whatever our problems, we are living in the best of times with the smartest of people (including us, of course). Such recombinant, blinkered hubris (every age’s version is a little different around the edges) leads to fascinating art and amusing scrambles by vested-interest religionists. But it repeatedly and inevitably leaves the richest and the smartest and the most powerful on their deathbeds muttering, "Rosebud, Rosebud." Those people (us!) who have bought so deeply into consensual cultural reality can hardly allow the possibility that other, vaster knowledge and, with it, other, vaster power might co-exist with their 38-car garages and platinum Movados. So threatening (and incontrovertible), for example, was Don Juan’s message in the Casteņeda books that all we could do was discredit the problematic messenger. Hint for the seeker: Not all prophets are cut from the same cloth. Compare Don Juan’s quasi-militaristic, hyper-active, Latinate Naqual with Lao-Tze’s sedate, laid-back, contentedly rotund Chinese Tao. Of one thing you may be sure—and here is the metaphysical trap by which to catch the king, the queen, the toady, and the jester, the far vision of which we speak here (the true tele-vision) comes only at a price so great that only those who must, pay it: purity of heart. Patanjali, Bodhidharma, Thomas, Juan de la Cruz, Teresa, Hildegard, Eckhardt, Traherne, Blake, Novalis: their descendants, their metaphysical heirs are here now, among us, seeing. Invisible? Yes. But only because, though they inhabit bodies just like yours and mine, their pure hearts render them unseeable to the rest of us. Easier to find a unicorn than to see one of these guys. Oh sure, you may pass them on the street. But know them? A child could more easily figure out to operate a nuclear power plant. END
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