Camel or rope, still can't squeeze through!

"And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." ~ Matthew 19:24

This well-known quote from the New Testament attributed to the apostle Matthew has been the subject of endless debate over the centuries. Some scholars say that the Master Yeshua (called "Jesus" by modern-day Christians) wasn't referring to a camel but to a rope. One bible study site I stumbled upon while researching this subject has this to say:










Jesus and all the Jews spoke a language called Aramaic, and the word gamla meant either a camel or a large rope, just as we have words which are spelled the same, but have different meanings. And some of the earlier translators or copyists must have taken the wrong meaning here. For no one would ever talk about a camel going through a needle's eye. But every Jewish house had several large ropes, that were used to tie bundles on the backs of men and animals.

Even in Greek the camel-rope confusion persists. The Greek word for "thick rope" is kamilos; and "camel" is kamelos. But in wasting so much breath arguing about whether the Master meant "rope" or "camel" many theologians have completely missed the point.

And the point is the Eye of the Needle. Graphically, you can visualize it as a very narrow aperture that the thread absolutely has to squeeze through if you want to do any sewing with it.

I prefer to use "more scientific" terminology by calling it the Frequency Scanner. What, you may ask, is a "frequency scanner"? The secular definition is what radio buffs would be familiar with and it has to do with identifying the source of radio transmissions by means of a vast database of terrestrial radiowave frequencies.

As I'm not a radio buff I generally go with the "spiritual" definition wherein the Frequency Scanner is what measures an individual's auric purity and molecular integrity. All of us are born with hardwired frequency scanners which we may not necessarily be aware of. Those who unconsciously use their frequency scanners to suss other people might call it "intuition" or "instinct" or "following their gut feelings."


The Eye of the Needle, therefore, is a powerful metaphor for the perfectly natural process of self-selection whereby each soul determines its own onward evolution - or otherwise. Each of us must gather all the different threads of our genetic memories and converge them into a single point, in order to penetrate the most modest of apertures - the vulva of a vestal virgin, who represents the call of the Mother of all Goddesses, to return to our divine origins in her cosmic womb and be reborn anew.

I view the soul's pilgrimage through the fields of density and complexity as the method by which the Atman (Divine Self) gathers experiential data and then rearranges it to generate coherent patterns, which often take the forms of sacred geometry. If you imagine each life as a colored thread warping and woofing through the tapestry of eternity, it's almost inevitable that you will eventually begin to perceive the grand mandala of Life Itself and experience a glorious eureka moment.


Was the Master Yeshua a closet socialist? Why such a pronounced prejudice against rich folks? When he is quoted as saying there's no way a rich man can gain entry into "the kingdom of God" - does he mean this literally? Or was it just a bad hair day for Jesus that yielded this particular injunction?

My sons-in-law are fairly rich guys. And I consider them both decent and goodhearted souls. The only essential difference between us is that both are almost entirely focused on building their businesses and ensuring their families enjoy the very best that life can offer - while I'm almost entirely focused on freeing myself from any form of busyness.

Having spent more than 50 years researching what some may call the esoteric realm, I consider myself fairly well informed about the funky stuff that goes on within the Inner Planes. However, when it comes to subjects like sports or the stock market, my understanding of these worldly matters borders on the imbecilic.

So, from my personal perspective, what the Master Yeshua actually meant by his provocative statement was simply this: those who get overly caught up in external reality will find it a lot harder to attune to their own inner voice. If all one ever hears is the loud chattering of the marketplace, sportscasters and airheaded radio DJs, it's quite unlikely that one will ever acquire the necessary neural acumen to break free of the artificial holographic matrix wherein our anthropocentric games of buy-and-sell and win-or-lose are being played out.

No matter how much money you may have stashed away in some offshore account, you will still end up shitting your pants when you wake up one morning to discover that Wall Street no longer exists. The Jewish brokers made off with all your cash while you were fast asleep. What those silly scammers intend to do with all their worthless currency notes not even God knows.

They could use their $50 bills for rolling tobacco, just to remind themselves that they were once loyal subjects of Rex Mundi. Or they could pile up all the currency notes and make the most extravagant bonfire in history. Or wipe their bottoms with $10 bills just to prove they are no longer obsessed with "the bottom line."


In any case, you can rest assured that money distilled from the blood, sweat and tears of countless generations of semi-conscious and mentally enslaved humans will not be accepted as legal - or illegal - tender in the kingdom of God (I prefer to use the term "heaven").

All the fang-and-claw scenarios of dog-eat-dog politicians... the feeding frenzy of cocaine-crazed remisiers... the hustle and push of insurance and snake oil salesmen... the wheelers and the dealers... prime movers and shakers... the cigar-chomping moguls and ghoulish martini-swilling financiers behind the glitter and glamor of Hollywood, Bollywood and Follywood... I'm not letting them into heaven, no way!

Not unless they clear their emotional garbage and get their auric fields clear and fragrant.

God's love is both unconditional and conditional.

(If you happen to be a fan of Richard Dawkins and don't believe in God, that's fine. I don't need you to believe in me to be whatever and whoever I am, because the only God I accept as authentic is the one I see in the mirror, and in every pair of eyes looking back at me. In any case, God is actually an atheist, like Professor Dawkins.)

"Unconditional" - in the sense that even the ones who end up in a hell of their own making are still cherished and valued as souls and will always be offered another opportunity to clean up their acts and get out of their ruts.

"Conditional" - in the sense that if you misunderstand what Mastery is all about and go about enslaving and exploiting a whole lot of other lifeforms - human and non-human - because you erroneously believe that's what Masters do, then you've pretty much flunked this evolutionary semester.

Or if you vehemently deny that you've just shit your pants - when everyone else in the room is holding their noses and glaring at you and pointing to that gooey brown liquid oozing from your trouser leg and onto the plush carpet - well, then I suppose we shall just have to label you another "Hisham" or "Najib" and frogmarch you to the sanitization facility where, after a thorough cleansing, you'll be given all the emotional therapy you need to qualify for rebirth as a protozoon.

And it won't cost you a penny, don't worry.

Carl Jung was fond of recounting an old ecclesiastical joke that goes like this:

Student: There were men in the olden days who saw the face of God. Why don't they see it any more?

Rabbi: Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.

DEAN JOHNS ON "KILLER KLEPTOIDS"

For the benefit of those who can't afford or are too kedekut to subscribe to Malaysiakini, I'm reproducing this ribtickling and heartbreaking piece by one of my all-time favorite political columnists...


Dean Johns | Malaysiakini
December 2, 2009
1:38pm

Trying to make sense of the political scenario in Malaysia is always a surreal experience. But at times it all seems so far-fetched and flat-out fantastic that I think I must have lost the plot.

Or else that I've actually been asleep all this time, trapped in some bizarre nightmare based on replays of all those hair-raising old Hollywood horror movies I used to frighten myself silly by sitting through.

At times like these I get desperate for some kind of reality check. So you can imagine how grateful I feel to the likes of Barry Wain, with his new biography of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, for reassuring me that the doctor isn't some scary childhood movie memory or figment of my fevered imagination, but is actually, if incredibly, the former long-time prime minister of Malaysia.

And that the Frankenstein monster the doctor created isn't just some filmic fable, but a real-life political machine that's still rampaging around the country wreaking havoc wherever it goes and indulging its insatiable appetite by devouring whatever it can get its hands on.

If you'd believe Barry Wain, and why wouldn't you, as long as he works for neither the Malaysian nor Singapore mainstream press, the BN machine has swallowed RM100 billion of Malaysians' money in the past 25 of its 52 years in power.

And according to Time magazine, economist Daniel Lian of Morgan Stanley Singapore estimates it's consumed about three times the amount estimated by Wain, or US$100 billion.

Here, in case you missed them, are a few highlights of this saga of monumental theft, fraud and embezzlement:

* Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF) swindle: US$1 billion
* Bank Negara foreign-exchange fiasco: RM20 billion
* Extra BMF bailouts: US$600 million
* Perwaja Steel bankruptcy: US$ 800 million
* Maminco tin market manipulation: US$500 million
* Bank Islam non-performing loans scam: RM2.2 billion
* Highway concessionaire bailouts: RM38.5 billion
* Mirzan Mahathir's MISC rescue: RM600 million
* Port Klang Free Zone scandal: RM12 billion

If that's not enough plundered billions to make you bilious, don't worry. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Or should I make that 'heistberg'? Whatever, it's a considerable quantity of loot for a government to steal from its citizens.

Heart-breaking human cost

How the Malaysian people have tolerated being robbed on such an epic scale for so long I can't begin to guess. Why so many millions of them never stopped voting for the doctor or his successors, or never chased any of them, King Kong-like, up to the top of the Twin Towers to his downfall and doom is a total mystery.

Unless, of course, that like me they've been assuming that the whole thing was so unbelievable that it must be just a movie, and gone on scoffing their popcorn and kuaci as though the horror would eventually end and they could safely return from this harsh reel world to an altogether happier real one.

Or maybe they were thinking that, as long it was only money the monster was after, they'd be safe if they let it have its fill, and that with luck they might score their share of any small change that happened to slip through its fingers.

What they failed to realise, however, is that the BN money-chomping monster's been in league all along with those other fixtures of this long-running Malaysian fright-flick, the werewolves of the police and MACC, the body-snatchers of the internal security ministry, the vampires of commerce, contracting and the civil service, and the droids of the mainstream media.

With a monster cast this creepy to contend with, it's no wonder so many otherwise potentially sentient citizens have been turned into such political and ethical zombies.


With the watchdogs of the law at their throats, thousands of blood-suckers with their fangs in their necks and hundreds of make-believe journalists busy blinding their eyes, deafening their ears and dumbing their minds, some people are bound to get somewhat confused.

Which brings us to the fact that the tragedy is not so much the amount of money, land and other public property that BN and its minions have stolen and continue to steal but the heart-breaking human cost of it all.

The financial toll taken by the police, MACC and judiciary in corruption is chicken-feed compared with the priceless protections and trust that they've stolen from the people, not to mention the countless lives they've stolen from 'suspects' in staged 'shootouts' and 'questioning' in custody.

Revenge of the voters

The billions looted and squandered by the government and its cronies are nothing compared with the human rights, educations, opportunities, hopes, dreams and futures they've stolen from Malaysians born on the 'wrong' side of the screen that the ideologues of BN have erected between the races and religions on which to play their wayang kulit of 1Malaysia.

And now, having skinned the Malaysians alive in every conceivable fashion from financial to spiritual, they've had the hide to introduce a goods and services tax, thus adding even more to the swag of oil and tax revenues that BN has traditionally siphoned-off from behind the impenetrable screen of the official secrets act.

They're also, I see, still paying Najib Abdul Razak's airfare and considerable expenses to go around the world robbing Malaysia of even more of its Mahathir-ravaged international reputation with remarks like his recent one in New York that "Malaysia's message of reforms and transformation must be told to foreign investors."


Who does he think he's kidding about Malaysia as long as it's still business as usual for him and his gang of BN bandits? Doesn't he realise that embassies and high commissions report the truth back to their home governments?

And that trade commissioners and reputable global financial media keep investors informed of the larcenies of national governments like Malaysia's?

Sometimes I think Najib's recited his script so often he's started to almost believe it himself.

I certainly hope so. Because the more over-confident that he and his coalition cronies become that their Attack of the Killer Kleptoids production is set to run permanently, the more shocked they'll be by its inevitable sequel, Revenge of the Voters from Hell.

Well done, Anwar! Najib, balik kampung!

I found out from my friend-in-exile a short while ago that Anwar Ibrahim has been listed by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2009."

Not too sure if that's really such a tremendous honor, since Anwar has to share the stage with a few dubious characters like Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the übercriminal Federal Reserve), Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger (the man who approved the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, an atrocious act that resulted in the leukemia deaths of at least 500,000 non-combatants and exposed 4.2 million Vietnamese to dioxin poisoning).

Nevertheless, Anwar is the only Malaysian on the list - along with other prominent Asian freedom-fighters like Amartya Sen and Aung San Suu Kyi - and that in itself deserves a hearty congratulation or two.

After all, I doubt Anwar had to pay RM20 million to some Jewish PR agency to upgrade his public image and make him look good in the eyes of the world.

Here's what Foreign Policy has to say about Anwar:

Anwar Ibrahim
for challenging the Muslim world to embrace democracy.

Opposition leader | People's Justice Party | Malaysia

Two decades ago, it would have been impossible to imagine Anwar pulling together rural Malays, ethnic Indians and Chinese, and Islamists into a coherent political bloc. Back then, Anwar was deputy prime minister in a de facto single-party state that espoused preferential treatment for ethnic Malays. It was a policy that Anwar had pushed from his days as a youth leader right up until 1997, when he denounced his patron, then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, for corruption. He would spend the next six years in solitary confinement on trumped-up charges for that political betrayal. And he would leave jail in 2004 with a bold message for change in a country now at the forefront of the struggle for democracy in the Muslim world. Today, Anwar's political career is blossoming, despite a new, politically motivated indictment. Abroad, he has become an outspoken advocate of religious tolerance.

He sat down with Foreign Policy to talk about his big ideas:

On Muslim countries and the West: You can't just erase a period of imperialism and colonialism. You can't erase the fault lines, the bad policies, the failed policies, the war in Iraq, and support for dictators. That to me is the reality. But what is the problem? When you … apportion the blame only to the West or the United States. They want to deflect from the issue of repression, endemic corruption, and destruction of the institutions of governance.

On his time in prison: I spent a lot of time reading. I decided to focus on the great works and the classics. Friends from around the world were sending books, but it takes months for [the prison] to vet them. There came a book on the Green Revolution at that time. The officer said, "Anything revolution -- out!" even though it was about agriculture. But the books kept coming. The officers were not even graduates, and [the books] were in English. They would say, "Anwar, out of 10 books, can you send back one?" So I would select something I had already read or something I was not interested in and say, "We should reject this."

On politics: Of course, you simplify the arguments [for politics], but the central thesis remains constant. People say, "Anwar, you are opportunistic. How can you talk about Islam and the Quran here, and then you talk about Shakespeare and quote Jefferson or Edmund Burke?" I say, it depends on the audience. You can't talk about Edmund Burke in some remote village in Afghanistan. Then you go to Kuala Lumpur and you quote T.S. Eliot. If I quote the Quran all the time to a group of lawyers, [they will think] I am a mullah from somewhere!

Enema of the People: a double dose of RPK

[NOTE: I just got back from a rare visit to Melaka where a 3-day Art & Performance Festival has just been concluded, featuring a friendly and vibrant troupe of artists, mostly Melbourne-based, brought in by dancer-choreographer Tony Yap, an illustrious prodigal son of Melaka who went to Australia in 1976 to further his studies - and ended up becoming a dance sifu to a brilliant new generation of dancers. More about this piquant but inadequately publicized event when I've caught my breath. Meanwhile, thank heaven for the engagingly lucid and outspoken RPK, who can always be counted on for some political edification - and who happens to be my favorite prescription for a badly constipated body politic.]