Monday, March 6, 2023
4076-4078: Hardness of Heart from Lincoln County Watch
By Anna Von Reitz
When
I was young and reading The Holy Bible and other ancient scriptures for
the first time, I kept running across this topic of "hardness of
heart".
Being a child, I at first wondered if this was a literal disease like hardening of the arteries?
Not
bad as a theory, but no, as my much-older Sister explained --- it was
more like people put a shell, like a nut shell, around their hearts, so
they couldn't feel things anymore.
Oh. Why would anyone do that?
To
stop hurting and avoid caring. To avoid entanglements with others. To
defend oneself from other people's opinions--- and needs. To find some
little scrap of peace and certainty, even if it's a painfully limiting
and costly certainty.
As
I got older and I caught myself going through recurring waves of this
"hardening of the heart" process, it was all too clear how and why we
suffer from almost universal hardening of the heart.
Disappointments
in love, ruined opportunities, betrayals by friends and co-workers,
caustic embittered employers, whining critical people in general, bad
karma, hairy moles, poverty or empty riches, sacred relationships turned
into commercial accommodations, grinding necessities and obligations of
various kinds ---it all adds up.
After
a while you feel like you are treading water in a garbage pit, and get
desperate to isolate yourself, so, you harden your heart.
I
got so fed up with self-pitying "victims" at one point that I decided
that they pitied themselves enough to make up for everyone else.
And a big "Bah, Humbug!" on that.
Life hadn't exactly been kind to me, either. So, I lost patience and hardened my heart some more.
I
discovered that I could harden my heart right along with the best of
the hard-hearted. It was easy. Just flip the bird and don't care.
I remembered my younger caring self, like an increasingly distant stranger, back when my heart wasn't hard.
For a period of about ten years, I didn't laugh, except for the inane tittering that hard-hearted people pass off as laughter.
When your heart is hard, you can't really feel laughter.
I made the obligatory donations to good causes and patted myself on the back for my generosity.
When your heart is hard, you can't really give anything, but you can go through the motions.
And
because I was hard-hearted I attracted all kinds of other hard-hearted
people into my life, and we would stand around at snobby dinner parties
belly-bumping our hard shells together.
The
truth is that it is a lot easier to be hard-hearted than it is to tear
the wrapper off and put up with all the slings and arrows and rotten
tomatoes.
Believe me. Been there. Done that.
At the end of the day, you can't live in the shelter of a hard heart. You can only freeze in place and wait for your own death.
So, one day, one of my co-workers made me laugh. I was helpless. Rolling on the floor. Breathless. And it felt so good....
I
took a deep breath and felt my hardness of heart dissolving, like a dam
giving way before the torrent of life in all its glory and sadness, and
a voice in my ear said, "Darling, you have to accept all of it.
Straight up. Can you do that?"
I thought about it for a moment.
Yes, I could. I was tough enough. I finally knew that.
So I let my full metal flak jacket slip away and I don't regret it. I am grateful to my co-worker to this day.
When
you are reading about "hard heartedness" in the Bible, this is what God
is talking about, this willful, self-protecting, self-absolving,
self-centered existence without connection with or compassion for the
rest of suffering Creation.
If
you are going to live in this world -- as it is now -- you are going to
suffer along with it. You are going to suffer fear and injustice. You
are going to feel outrage and struggle with contempt. You will be
pierced to the heart. You will wonder about your purpose and your
sanity. You will know loneliness and every kind of want.
Yet,
this is true also ---you will live life in each moment and experience
it fully, and sooner or later, you will find courage and strength and
abilities you never dreamed of, you'll find friends and mentors and
cohorts, you will be aware of your breath and the fact that you are
alive, and in time, you, too, will know the reasons.
Keep
your heart open as a flower, in sunshine or rain, and life will begin
to make sense to you. The ebb and flow of it, too, will come into
view.
Keeping
your heart open as a child's is the ultimate act of faith, a test that
we all must pass through again and again, until sheer love overcomes and
we are burned clean, left pure and at peace.
If
you struggle with being hard-hearted, it can be reversed. It's just a
choice, and you can choose other choices for yourself and your world.
So, choose to feel and suffer and rise and be, live and laugh and lose along with the rest of us.
You will be in good company.
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A Most Unlikely Place
By Anna Von Reitz
When
I think of Nigeria I let my mind wander from the ultra-humid, ultra-hot
cesspool of Lagos and drift slowly over the higher and cooler
elevations until I reach the dry lands away from the coast.
As
I do this, the whole tenor of the place changes from the swarming,
grasping, Christian ports and islands, rank with the smell of greed and
desperation, to the arid asceticism of the Muslim-held interior of the
country.
I
don't blame Nigerians for being greedy. Last time I looked, the
exchange rate of the U.S. Dollar against the Nigerian currency was 1:13,
so a hundred dollar bill equals $1300 in the local economy.
There
are a lot of people in Nigeria, mostly crammed into a small section of
the western coast, and by far, the vast majority of these people are
very poor, scrambling along, trying to make a buck any way they can,
having to strive hard to keep themselves and their families fed.
Sanitation
is a constant problem in the densely populated areas of Nigeria, and
successive waves of disease are common. First it's cholera, then it's
malaria, then it's hemorrhagic fever, then it's...well, you get the
picture.
Except
for Missionaries and Oil Company Personnel and gun runners, envoys from
the West are seldom seen in Nigeria, and the only ones that make a
point of mingling with the locals are the Missionaries.
It
has been this way for centuries, because other than oil, and in the old
days of the slave trade, its people, Nigeria has little to sell to the
rest of the world.
When
all the other countries lined up for "American" Foreign Aid (not that
any of them actually got much) Nigeria was sent ship loads of old,
moldy, green Army Surplus wool blankets from the Second World War. The
Nigerians and the Missionaries stood on the dock and scratched their
heads. Not very helpful in Equatorial Africa, but they accepted the
gift anyway, and made use of the cloth in amazing ways --- tablecloths
in restaurants, Christmas ornaments, shade tents.
The Nigerian people are nothing if not resourceful. They've had to be.
Yet, downtrodden, poor, by-passed, sickly Nigeria is where everything began from language to knowledge of advanced physics.
Unknown thousands of years ago, Nigeria gave us language.
Untold thousands of years ago, Nigerians knew the truth about the structure of the Universe.
We are just now discovering what the artifacts of the Igbo people of Nigeria mean.
So,
let's pause and reflect. That same country that we have ignored and
pillaged and fought with, these same people who have suffered and
starved and been enslaved and treated like animals by successive waves
of European Colonialists --- and now, by US and European Corporations
engaged in the same thing --- they solved the Unified Field Theory long,
long ago. And taught us how to speak.
So much for the inferiority of black people, forever and ever, Amen.
Nigeria
is hardly where we would look for the roots of all known language
groups on Earth, nor would anyone expect that Ancient Nigerians
hand-carved the structure of the Universe and the mathematics of it all
on a rock--- but they did.
May we all pause for a moment and be humble.
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You Are "the Third Temple"
By Anna Von Reitz
We
have been taught to think of "the Third Temple" as a building, like
Solomon's temple, built by men to honor the glory of God.
Or was it built by men for their own sakes? Go figure.
They
pretended to glorify God, but God needed no glory from them. The
temple building was more about giving men something they needed,
something visible to anchor their faith and impress the neighbors.
Now, imagine a temple built by God to honor his own glory?
God
left the temple after what happened on Golgotha, never to return to it.
He left the Hebrews to sort out their own mess. He tore the temple
curtain in front of the Holy of Holies from top to bottom, and that
mighty wind? That was the Lord God Almighty exiting.
Today,
there is a focus on "building the Third Temple" and all sorts of
attention on theTemple Mount and Jewish intentions to build a new temple
on it. Just recently, we had another international incident focused on
this:
What
if I told you that we have proof that the Temple Mount is not and never
was the location of the temple described in the Bible? What if that
location was completely razed, just as Yeshuah foretold, without one
block left standing on another?
The
Romans didn't leave the Wailing Wall or any other supporting
superstructure related to the temple Jesus knew. When they razed the
temple at Jerusalem, they tore it up by the roots. They carted away the
blocks and used them for road work and other building projects. It was a
complete, utter demolition -- not one block left standing on another.
Literally.
The
location of the former temple is now a long grassy slope supporting a
turnpike, and all this focus on the Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall is
misguided.
The location of the "Temple Mount" venerated today is
the former location of the Roman Fort and Garrison in Jerusalem. That
piece of ground has nothing to do with God or Yeshuah or the Bible, but
men will be misled to fight and die over it just the same.
What did God do after he the left the temple?
He rebuilt the true temple of life, the body of his Son. He gave Yeshuah an incorruptible body.
You are yourselves the basis of the Third Temple, wherein God will dwell and write his Law on your hearts.
This is already happening, so no need to wonder about it or fight over it.
The Third Temple is not made from gold or cedars of Lebanon.
We shall worship, truly, in our own hearts.
So
don't get all steamed up about the plans and activities of men, the
strife engendered in Old Jerusalem, the constant brotherly scraping of
Judaism against Islam and both against Christianity.
The
day is fast approaching when all will be revealed and people will walk
around striking the heels of their hands against their foreheads and
saying, "And I didn't see this coming?" and they will finally remember
what he said, "Behold, I make all things new."
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