how interesting, old prophecies capture our imagination dead teachings preoccupy our minds useless knowledge invades the thoughts debate the right and wrong of things the tao still blows on outside closed windows.
These prophesies, I'm surprised those people wrote in English. .... What? The original texts were NOT in English? I see... who translated them, then, and when? Anybody here able to check with the original text to see if the translation is valid? (that was the problem with the Nostradamus "prophesies": VERY creative translation.) :bugeye: Hans :bugeye:
Am I the only one who thinks that an 8th century Tibetan monk would probably not look at a car and think that it was a horse with wheels? Replace that "horses run on wheels" with "people careen around in bathtubs with wheels" and it'll sound a little more reasonable to me... car don't look much like a horse, even if you've never seen a car.
you miss the point i think the horse represents transportation (on legs) the transportation is then envisioned to have wheels
Seems ambiguous to me... when someone says "When things move around and a guy goes to another guy, then money will be spent," or something like that, why is it supposed to impress? I'm sure I could make something up that would come true in the future, if I'm allowed to be that vague. How about this: "In the age of disenchantment, lights in the sky and lights on the ground will presage the dragon moving its tail, and all the leaders of men will hide their eyes." This could mean anything. ANYTHING.
I think you're missing the point. Yes, the statement was imprecise. However whatever precision it has is rather extraordinary. (And precision is tricky when the correct words don't even exist yet). Predicting future technology is a commonplace activity these days. But even attempting it is an odd thing to do in the eighth century. Nobody is trying to say that this prophecy/science fiction proves anything. The question is just interesting. What could he have meant by his words, and where did the words come from, considering that at the time they wouldn't have made any sense, (unlike your attempt). Perhaps cars, aeroplanes and the creation of the Tibetan diaspora is all just a quirky coincidence. However the question of what he meant by his curious words still remains.
On the other hand, locomotives were referred to as "Iron Horses"? They don't look at all like horses made of iron, do they?
Traveling? All mankind is believed, by many Anthropologists and Archaeologists, to have origins in the same relatively confined area of Africa. There is evidence of European settlers in Ancient China. It is widely believed that "Native Americans" settled here from Europe traveling through Alaska. There is evidence suggesting that the Phonecians were global sea-farers and explorers before Ancient Egypt and perhaps responsible for some of the uncanny similarities in language, culture and religions of ancient civilizations. Both prophecies could have been written in tandem when some the ancient Tibetans left to migrate to the West (America) (although, if one were to leave Tibet to migrate to America by foot they would be heading East). I will admit that I question the accuracy of the translation as well, but I doubt that it was contrived to make the two sound similar, and the "prophecies" may have some real validity. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels” "When the iron bird flies" It doesn't have to specifically refer to a "vision" of an airplane or an automobile. It could very well be a simple idea referring to when mechanical inventions make traveling across great distances of land faster and easier than riding horseback and when man has invented machines that will allow him to fly.
this is so fascinating That obviously implies that the Hopi & Tibetan ARE somehow closely related, but how is this possible? Aren't they two different races of human beings, entirely and on very different ends of the earth? Does anybody know anything about the history of human migrations... that might explain the connection. The Native Americans did after all, cross into the New World thru the Straigt of something (forgot) that was connected to what is now Russia, which is near Tibet. But why only the Hopi & the Tibet then? Why not all Native Americans & the Tibet. I think this whole situation is so fascinating.
This is very interesting. I really want to know the person who made the translation. This also means that those people could look in to the future? But then why didnt they take advantage of this great gift? Doesn't man always seek power Buddhist or not Buddhist. Should i really believe that Buddhist people dont seek power but spirituality?
Buddhists don't seek either in many senses of the words, but they can mean different things to different people. Buddhism is often described (by Buddhists) as 'the serious pursuit of happiness'. But that needs a lot of unpacking.
Miss Khan et al.: Actually, this happens all the time. Look at the commonalities in our mythologies. Virgin birth, human child raised by wolves, man dies and comes back to life, big flood wipes out all life, bird dies and is reborn in a fire, weeping woman walks the streets every night, snake sets us on a path of eternal damnation. Not every culture has every one of these myths, but they are incredibly common. Jung calls them "archetypes" and the whole paradigm is the "collective unconscious." Jung didn't explain how they got inside us, he was a pragmatist and just pointed them out so we could use them to figure ourselves out, and also to let us know that we really are all brothers and sisters. It could be a coincidence of the wiring in our synapses, just a fluke of evolution. It could be that archetypes help us cope better so they are a survival trait and the people without them died out. In either of those cases it means that they've been with us since we were one tribe living in Africa. If you're religious, you can put any interpretation you want on these things, although Jung himself was rather hostile to the patriarchal, monotheistic religions of the Age of Civilizaiton.
Re: this is so fascinating You're pretty close. The indigenous peoples of the New World are in fact of Mongoloid stock, meaning close relatives of the East Asians. They branched off quite a while ago, before their cousins who stayed home developed the epicanthic eye folds that to us define "Oriental," but DNA says they're the same gene pool. The first wave of immigrants, the Athabascans, migrated across the Bering Land Bridge (it was the Ice Age then so sea level was much lower) around 14000 BCE. Some think they sailed over in boats, hugging the coastline, a few thousand years earlier but it doesn't change the results any. Their point of origin has been zoomed down to a fairly small area in what is now Mongolia. They populated the entire hemisphere. The Incas, Mayas, Aztecs, Mohawks, Sioux, most of the people in the New World are of Athabascan descent. Then around 4000 BCE the second wave came -- same gene pool, and actually a fairly close starting point in Mongolia. They're called the Na-Dene. They found the hemisphere fairly well populated and couldn't make much headway. They displaced the people who were living west of the Rockies (which by the way means that the Indians who now live in Washington State cannot possibly be the descendants of "Kennewick Man," if you've been following that controversy) and became the Chumash and Tlingit and most of the tribes of the western US and Canada. The last wave, the Eskimo-Aleut, arrived around 2000 BCE. Fortunately for them they were not from nice warm Mongolia, they were used to living in the Arctic Zone, because that's the only place that was left for them to settle. Their roots to their cousins in northern Siberia are still very obvious, in language and customs. They are an indigenous people who has come very close to circling the globe, although admittedly at a latitude where that's a pretty small circle. The Asian branch runs practically up to the eastern border of Finland, and the American branch has settled Greenland. Nothing separating them except the Scandinavian countries! So this explains how the Tibetans, who are closely related to the Chinese, can have a common mythology with the Indians. (If you didn't buy my previous post.) But actually it gets better. Recent research suggests that there are not a whole bunch of language families. We've seen the number of families shrink over the past hundred years, as they found relationships such as the one that unites Mongolian, Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish into one family. But now, using massively parallel computer processing to analyze linguistic patterns that could never be done manually, they're finding amazing and very widespread similarities between languages, when you adjust for sound shifts that a thousand computers can track. They've already joined the Indo-European family to the one I described above and call it the Eurasiatic family. But it keeps getting better. They're tracing words from Sino-Tibetan, Semitic, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, and other families all back to a common source. It looks very much like language sprang up in Africa when we were all still living there, and all human languages are descended from a single ancestor. When you think about it, it makes sense. What gave humans the ability to suddenly become so successful that they virtually exploded out of Africa into every climate zone and every ecosystem? Perhaps the ability to communicate! So the answer to your question could be both more complicated and more simple than you expected. It's looking like all of our migration paths can be tracked back in tribal groups to our African ancestors, who were already talking. Language was only invented once, not multiple times. All human languages are related. I'm jumping the gun, they've really only got it narrowed down to two families as of right now. But geeze, that's an amazing leap from the dozens of families that we used to believe in. We really are all brothers and sisters. It's a shame we can't act like it! To clear up a couple of nits: Someone asked why the Navajo and the Hopi don't seem to be closely related. The reason is that they aren't. Migrations in the New World led people on long Treks. One of those tribes is a member of the Na-Dene people, and the other is Athabascan. Their ancestors arrived ten thousand years apart, so their cultures are much different. I can't for the life of me remember which is which. I know that the Utes are related to the Aztecs and are therefore Athabascans living in Na-Dene territory, but I don't know whether it's the Navajos and Hopis that are in the "wrong place." And the concept of "red faces" came up. We've all been brainwashed into such a state of political correctness that we've forgotten that the early Americans called the Indians "red." It's OK, because many of them call themselves that. (Just like it's really OK to call them Indians. I've never met one who didn't sneer at the term "native American," because, as they point out, I'm a native American because I was born in Chicago but I sure as hell ain't no Indian!) In one of their legends, they identify four races of people: red, yellow, brown, and white. This legend goes back at least two thousand years, long before Columbus or Leif Erikson came over with their white skins. So who are they talking about? Could this be a really ancient legend they brought over from Asia sixteen thousand years ago???
Great post. I didn't realise that much was known. I take 'red faced' people to mean white folks, but who knows.
Fraggle rocker- I really dont buy into jung's collective unconcious, from what little I know of it thru Psych 101, but your second post was very helpful. Thanks Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Let's have some fun with this... Now, let's connect a few dots... "In the age of disenchantment, THE TIME WE ARE CURRENTLY IN, IN WHICH WARNINGS ARE BEING FULFILLED SIGNALLING THE POSSIBLE END OF TIME, lights in the sky, LIGHTS FROM PLANES OR IRON BIRDS, and lights on the ground, LIGHTS FROM CARS, TRAINS, BIKES OR IRON HORSES, will presage the dragon moving its tail, AMERICA WAKING FROM A SLUMBER (UPON THE MEETING/VISITATION PREVIOUSLY TALKED ABOUT), and all the leaders of men will hide thier eyes IN FEAR OF THE FORETOLD END OF TIMES, DUE TO THE CULMINATION OF THE COMPLETION OF THE WARNINGS AND PROPHECIES."
