Susan B. Martinez - Time of the Quickening: Prophecies for the Coming Utopian Age

I dedicate this book gratefully and affectionately to John W. White

TIME OF THE QUICKENING

In her book The Time of the Quickening, Susan B. Martinez has shared with her readers an impressive body of work regarding the art of prophecy. In addition, she has presented a unique and uplifting message of hope in a world gone awry.

STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D., COAUTHOR OFEXTRAORDINARY DREAMS AND HOW TO WORK WITH THEM

Susan Martinez has a way of discovering the spiritual connection in history and linking it with rare books, documents, and events. She is one of the best historical researchers I have ever known, and this book is a wealth of information. You may not agree with everything in it, but you will enjoy reading every sentence and it will stimulate your thinking. I highly recommend this book.

JOHN DESALVO, PH.D., AUTHOR OF THE LOST ART OF ENOCHIAN MAGIC AND DECODING THE ENOCHIAN SECRETS

I am the signs of the times.

I speak in the wind...

At one time they called me

"the handwriting on the wall."

Today, I am simply called "as things indicate"...

By my face the prophets foretell what is to be.

I am the living mathematics; the unseen progress of things...

My name is: The Signs of the Times.

I speak in the wind, and man saith; Behold, something is in the wind; the Gods are at work a new light breaketh in upon the understanding of men

-Oahspe Book of Ben VII: 1-5

The closing chapter to ten thousand years of madness and greed is being written right here and now.

KURT VONNEGUT, JAILBIRD

This thing is getting ready to blow.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON, JUST PRIOR TO THE WATERGATE SCANDAL

When one thinks there is only an end, that is when one must struggle for the new beginning.

CHAIM POTOK

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

INTRODUCTION

CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT

The last day of the Lord is near, cried William Miller, self-proclaimed prophet of the American sect of Millerites (Second Aventists) in May 1844. Issuing the midnight cry, Miller felt the crowning crisis of the ages at hand. He even gave the last day a date: October 23 of that year. But when that dreaded day arrived, and the next and the next, the Millerites bewailedstill in the cold world!

Fig. I-1. Catastrophes marked the end times in Millerite literature and illustrations.

Oh well, end times, if nothing else, are good box office and grist for the mill among cults of despair, perhaps represented today by such groups as Aum Shirin Kyo, the terrorist Buddhist sect that released the lethal chemical sarin on the Tokyo subways in 1995. Those fanatics embraced the apocalyptic notion that the world would end sometime between 1997 and 2000.

But again, it didnt. It just kept on spinning, spinning....

The world was also supposed to expire in 1936, on September 16, to be exact, according to a pyramid-related prophecy that quite a lot of people took seriously. One journalist, reporting on the upcoming event and the believers thereof, reported that the latter (a religious group in New Jersey) thought it was high time for the antichrist, Mr. 666, to appear. To [their] way of thinking, several modern dictators might easily fit the role.

Well be hearing more about Mr. 666 in these pages.

Actually, soberly, our world is not scheduled to expire for quite some time (see chapter 4). And we might as well note the considerable difference between the end of a civilization and the end of the world (i.e., the planet). If we can move on from attention-grabbing hysterics, paranoia, and the misguided calculations of overwrought end-time soothsayers, the only remaining danger is the end of civilization as we know it.

That is a distinct possibility in the years now unfolding and is the subject of this book.

Thousands of ordinary people have expressed that they felt the end of things breathing down their necks. Many sense an awesome destiny for the latter days of the world. And these are the latter days (see chapter 6). While the cynics shrug off our civilization as toast, others only vaguely feel that modern society is at a dead end, that it has no future....

We are losing control of our future.

ROBERT ORNSTEIN AND PAUL EHRLICH, NEW WORLD NEW MIND

There are so many people who have given up hope for a better tomorrow, lamented my friend Shaka, a product of devastated Detroit (see chapter 8). Another African American who finally got to make a trip to Mother Africa was deeply disillusioned at what he saw of contemporary life there. Keith B. Richburg, in his book Out of Africa: A Black Man Confronts Africa, wrote, The best and brightest minds languishing in dank prison cells... ruthless warlord[s]... teenagers terrorizing and looting... mass hunger... poets hanged by soldiers.... I tried to see some slivers of light... but all I can see is more darkness.

Yes, the darkness is almost more than we can stand, and with ancient prophecies pointing to 1998 as the end of an Earth cycle, it is almost as if we in the twenty-first century are living on borrowed time. Many psychic visions entail a combination of natural and man-made disasters before the end of the twenty-second century, wiping out large numbers of people and leaving the planet severely depopulated. It would certainly solve the population problem. Think of it, after the Black Death in Europe (see chapter 4), the entire world population was reduced to 375 million. Thats about 6 percent of todays population. But then postwar growth in the twentieth century was so explosive and unprecedented, it became natural to regard our present status as the height, the peak of, of... this civilization.

PEAKED OUT?

Humanity, thought Edward Bellamys narrator in his popular futuristic novel Looking Backward, 20002087, had made a sad mess of society, and having climbed to the top rung of the ladder of civilization, was about to take a header into chaos.... The race, he went on, making a comparison to the parabola of a comet, attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward to the regions of chaos. Underneath todays talk of peak oil rumbles an uneasy sense of peak culture, Bellamys perihelion of civilization.

Her boundaries may be large, and her people increasing, but she hath a canker worm within, that soon or late will let her down suddenly.

CHINE, A PROPHET, BOOK OF THE ARC OF BON

Fig. I-2. World population growth

In his extensive study of societal collapses, Jared Diamond finds several civilizations collapsing swiftly after attaining peak [emphasis added] population numbers and power.... This author observes, Crashes can befall the most advanced and creative societies. says Chet Snow in his book Mass Dreams of the Future.