Tag Archives: Jesus Christ Superstar

I Wish To Speak To The Entire World

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Super Bowl Ad Clydesdale Puppy I wish to speak to the entire worldIn the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” Judas Iscariot offered marketing advice to the master he betrayed:

If you’d come today
You could have reached the whole nation
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication

I wish to speak to the entire world

On the other hand, Jesus seemed to be fully aware as to how he wished to speak for himself. The gospel of Luke reports that Jesus had an “advance team” of seventy-two disciples, who went ahead of Jesus to every town and place where Jesus was about to go. Jesus clearly had no problem with requesting people’s attention. The gospel of John reports that Jesus stood up and cried out to the crowd on the last and greatest day of a religious festival of his nation. It’s possible that word about Jesus reached other nations during his lifetime. Perhaps Jesus had more marketing savvy than Judas thought.

I wish to speak to the entire world. I am pondering these things because I have a confession to make. I confess to wanting a Super Bowl ad for the New Message from God. I have already produced the ad in my imagination. It would involve some bits from the revelation “The Proclamation”, with our golden diamond logo and URL showing for the last 3 seconds or so.

I wish to speak to the entire world. Part of my confession is a confession of the deadly sin of Super Bowl ad envy. I have thought “If so-and-so can have a Super Bowl ad, why can’t we?” There are a lot of good answers to that question.

I wish to speak to the entire world. It’s possible that a Super Bowl ad isn’t the right vehicle for the New Message from God. Perhaps it would attract the ambitious and the self-serving. But what is the 2015 equivalent of Jesus standing up and crying out on the last and greatest day of the festival? Marshall Vian Summers said “I will call forth as far as I can.”. A YouTube channel, or a website, is the equivalent of setting up one’s stall in the marketplace of commitments. Is that good enough? I don’t think so. What am I doing about it? Writing another blog post. Is that good enough? I don’t think so.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

A Worldwide Community Of Responders

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Step 212 of Steps to Knowledge. I gain strength from all who practice with me. Earth from space. A worldwide community of respondersThe 2014 Encampment of the New Message from God had two firsts on Day 4. One of the firsts was a live webcast from an Encampment. The other first was a broadcast of a revelation from an Encampment, “The Worldwide Community of God’s New Message.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d69Ebit5PEc&list=PLC098FEE9DF940F62

This revelation was received on September 26, 2014. Yes, that’s right, about six weeks ago, about one week before the Encampment. The Encampment attendees had been notified that this revelation had been received. Therefore there was a certain anticipation as to what this revelation had to say about us and our fellow responders.

A worldwide community of responders

I can imagine someone reading this and thinking “Responders? Oh is that what you’re calling yourselves these days?” It is indeed. There was a time when we referred to ourselves as “students of the New Message.” But given that the Pashto word “Taliban” means “students,” that word has already been freighted with unfortunate connotations. One of the attendees on Day 2 referred to the people at Encampment as “first responders” to the Great Waves of Change, the difficult times ahead. The teaching Marshall read from Secrets of Heaven on Day 2 used the word “respond.” The revelation shared on Day 4 referred to us as “respondents,” as if the New Message from God was a plaintiff, requesting something from us. Variations of the words respond, responder, and respondent were in the verbal environment of Encampment.

The revelation “The Worldwide Community of God’s New Message” had many things to say. It is my hope you will read it. But in the meantime, I will try to share some of what it has to say.

The Society (some of whom I have recently introduced to you) will be the people who will play the leadership roles in the future of the New Message from God.

If you think the New Message from God is just about you, please do us all a favor and go somewhere else.

In the past, there have been people who have considered the emergence of one of God’s messengers to be an opportunity to use the messenger to promote their own agenda. I’m recalling Simon Zealotes’s song from the movie “Jesus Christ Superstar”

“There must be over fifty thousand
Screaming love and more for you.
And everyone of fifty thousand
Would do whatever you asked them to.
Keep them yelling their devotion,
But add a touch of hate at Rome.
You will rise to a greater power.
We will win ourselves a home!”

If you are going to be a “cafeteria New Message responder,” someone who picks and chooses the parts to which they respond and rejects other parts, please do us all a favor and go somewhere else.

If you wish to demonstrate the sincerity of your response, there are some things you can do. You can take the Steps to Knowledge (referred to in the revelation as “the Pathway”). You can read the revelations. You can read the books. You can listen to the recordings. You can listen to the voice of revelation, the audio of the messages.

The ambitious, the self-seeking and the self-serving are hazards to the future of the New Message from God.

If you wish to implement your own plan for presenting the New Message from God, please do us all a favor and go somewhere else. The revelation characterized this as “playing the Judas role.”

After the death of Marshall Vian Summers, nothing further will be added to the New Message. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

Being a responder to the New Message is being part of a community.

As I listened to this at Encampment, this portion resonated with me: “If you love humanity, if you love this world, if you love freedom, if you love inspiration, then this is the mountain you must climb. And this is not a mountain you will climb alone.”

I recalled the 4% figure Marshall shared as I heard this portion: “Even at this moment, there are millions waiting to receive God’s New Revelation. How will you find them? How will you reach them in time? How will you give them the gift that will liberate their minds and their hearts and provide a pathway out of the jungle of their circumstances?”

Marshall shared some things at the webcast, but I feel they should be addressed in another post. But after hearing the revelation, I came away with a clearer picture of what a worldwide community of responders might look like.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

2012 New Message Encampment Day 2 – I Should Be Suspicious Of What I Want

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In the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” King Herod sings…

Jesus, I am overjoyed to meet you face to face.
You’ve been getting quite a name all around the place.
Healing cripples, raising from the dead.
And now I understand you’re God,
At least, that’s what you’ve said.

When the New Message from God makes claims about itself and about Marshall Summers, some clarification is in order. The New Message claims to be a message ushering a new reality, a new way of being, a new way of navigating the world. It claims to be for this time what the revelations given to Moses were in his time, what the revelations given to Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed were in their times. It claims Marshall Summers is the Messenger of this New Message. I say this to say that if a person isn’t just a little bit shocked about this, they’re not paying attention.

We had a 30 minute silent group meditation, and after that meditation, I had an idea that I had never contemplated before. The known universe is a bigger place than most people imagine, than most people are capable of imagining. I understand this video travels through about a small portion of the known universe.

I realize there are differences of opinion about this, but I find it easier to believe that the universe described in this video is crawling with life, lousy with life, riddled with life, than to believe mankind is alone in that universe. And if God were to speak to our world, would He not speak to other worlds as well? If one were to presume our world to be entirely average, as worlds go, there must be quite a few worlds in the universe which are receiving a new message from God at the very moment you are reading these words.

We spent some time contemplating how we got to Encampment, not in the physical sense, but looking over our life history, seeing where we had followed Knowledge, and where we had either ignored Knowledge or resisted Knowledge.

Knowledge is a central technical term in the New Message from God. There is a step in the book Steps to Knowledge, a central New Message text, which asks and answers the question “What is Knowledge?”

“Let us say that Knowledge is not the things that are usually associated with it. It is not ideas. It is not a body of information. It is not a system of belief. It is not a process of self-evaluation. It is the great mystery of your life. Its outward manifestations are profound intuition, great insight, inexplicable knowing, wise perception in the present and in the future and wise understanding of the past. But despite these great achievements of mind, Knowledge is greater than this. It is your True Self, a Self that is not apart from life.” (Step 10, “What is Knowledge?”)

Many participants commented that the fulfillment of their desires, ambitions, agendas, etc., would have been disastrous for their reclamation of Knowledge. I shared a poem from Rumi which seemed to address that thought, and it seemed to resonate with the people with whom I shared it.

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.
I should be suspicious
Of what I want.

The original plan was to write one post about each day of Encampment, but this feels like a good stopping place. I’ve gotten roughly to the end of morning of the second day. More later.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.