“Ghosts in the Machine”
by Mark Bloomfield
July 18, 2007
"It's the blood of the Druids that never shall rest..." Stan
Rogers
Books, Bucks, Bloomfield: the three 'B's.' Wherever,
whenever and however these three ingredients come together, results
always have and always shall quickly follow.
 In
this instance, the third 'B' was the shipment of 480 large hardcover
Urantia Books from 533 courtesy of an anonymous donor that
eventually came into my possession, 380 of which were delivered to
my small boarding house room in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, on
Thursday June 7, 2007, whilst the remaining 100 were kept for me at
the shipping agent's warehouse in Durban where they arrived by sea.
Just
five weeks later on Wednesday 11th July, 310 books had been seeded
across the nation the story of which is the subject of this special
report. By the 16th, another 40 copies had arrived in Windhoek,
Namibia, with me by bus for the Namibian seeding and the remaining
130 were left at my lodgings in Port Elizabeth to be seeded upon my
return to South Africa, both of which will be described in
subsequent reports in the coming weeks.
A
second shipment of 500 books has been urgently requested in order to
do southern Africa any kind of justice, the case for support for
which has been included beneath this report (see below).
From
the outset I knew I was going to need more books. Five minutes after
entering Port Elizabeth (P.E.) Public Library, my first South
African seeding target, the lady librarian had put the library's
internal distribution network to their other 21 metro branches at my
disposal and asked how many copies I could spare. My reply of "22"
caused her face to light up. That very same day, visits to the local
college and the Greek Orthodox community among others confirmed the
trend: first world infrastructure, third world openness and
approachability.
Perhaps back in the apartheid era things may have been different but
as matters stood, the whites have had to embrace change whether they
liked it or not whilst the blacks and coloureds have started to
create their own middle class with time on their hands to do more
than just try to survive the day.
Living
out of cheap boarding houses and backpacker hostels and eating
simply as has always been my way when in the field, all the
remaining books were stored under the stair well of my boarding
house before taking the day bus from P.E. to Durban that weekend to
pick up the 100 books waiting for me at the shipping agent's
warehouse.
Though
South Africa's mostly first world infrastructure helps in terms of a
good road system and internal public library distribution networks,
life is relatively expensive which increases the need to work
quickly. But as this nation's gun crime statistics show it's three
major cities as the world's most dangerous after Baghdad, whilst
taxis are too expensive and city mini-buses usually more hassle than
they're worth, seeding cities on a shoestring must therefore be done
nearly entirely on foot despite the inherent risks.
Durban
was the first major urban hit with 85 books seeded across the
greater metro area, once again balancing the block seeding of public
library systems with the individual hand seeding of both secular and
religious centres of learning. Like the 8000 plus seedings of
previous years, a record is being faithfully kept of each and every
centre where the revelation has been given, such a record in and of
itself occasionally making interesting reading.
An
hour from Durban, the town of Pietermaritzburg, capital of the
province of Kwa-Zulu Natal was hand-seeded in a single morning. A
visit to both city and provincial library system headquarters there
proved that between the two, I could, had I have so desired, block
seed the entire shipment of books there even without leaving the
province.
After
returning to P.E. to finish seeding there, a hundred books went with
me on the overnight bus back to Cape Town where I had arrived in the
country from my previous assignment in the Far East.
Each
morning with a backpack of books on my shoulders, your fieldworker
walked through both well to do and slum neighbourhoods to reach the
day's targets armed only with a telescopic steel baton in his back
pocket to fend off murderous armed street thugs.
In
addition to the usual secular seeding targets, the usual religious
ones: bishops and archbishops, bible colleges and seminaries,
Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Bahai centres of learning. On the 26th of
June, even the Cape Town Church of Scientology accepted the
revelation for it's library after a long and friendly presentation.
After
returning once again to P.E., a morning was spent seeding historic
Grahamstown nearby before another overnight bus with another hundred
books inland this time to Bloemfontain, capital city of the Orange
Free State. Arriving with only a thin sweater and rain mac over my
shirt at 3.30 in the morning into exactly minus 6 celsius, I was
shivering almost uncontrollably as I tried to guard the books from
both predatory fake taxi drivers and the street thugs who had
clocked me, all the while carrying every cent I had in the whole
world in cash around my waist.
A few
days later with 60 books in place I loaded the remaining 40 on to
the long haul bus to Windhoek, Namibia that I could seed before
returning to S.A. on a new three month visa to enable me to finish
seeding the last of the remaining books still stored in P.E.
As the
books were being loaded on to the bus, the burly driver in broken
Afrikaans-English asked me if I was going to Namibia. Upon my
confirmation he said the books would most likely be confiscated by
Namibian customs and not to blame him if that happened. I told him
I'd take my chances. Having been in a string of similar situations
before, Michael was once again petitioned to the effect that I can't
help him if he doesn't help me.
Knowing something was going to have to give as I waited in transit
from Bloemfontain in the small town of Upington near the border for
a scheduled 6.30pm departure for Windhoek, it occurred to me that
for some reason the bus had not re-emerged for boarding yet. Six
hours later, it finally re-appeared which meant that instead of
arriving at the Namibian border in mid-evening, we got there at two
in the morning, only to be waved through the customs section by
bleary-eyed customs officials who wanted only to go back to sleep.
Having
broken down in the middle of the Kalahari Desert later that same
morning, we finally limped onwards with only two forward
gears arriving in Windhoek some nine hours behind schedule from
where this report is now being written. Tomorrow morning seeding in
earnest will begin here but that will be covered in the next special
report in the near future.
The
"ghost" of revealed truth continues to quietly filter into the
machine that is both the religious and secular establishment and all
that, on a worldwide scale. The World Seeding Mission ensures that
such a benign apparition just keeps appearing and ever more
frequently to the end that whereas previously stumbling across fifth
epochal truth would have been close to impossible, the time will
come when it becomes almost impossible not to.
Epochal revelations markedly change a planet's history and the fifth
shall be no exception so long as it's followers do what needs to be
done to continue it's worldwide dissemination and right now that
means among other things another 500 books to your fieldworker at
the earliest possible convenience.
In search of the Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield
Second UB Shipment to Southern
Africa:
The Case for Support
by Mark Bloomfield
June 29,
2007
-
A
twenty-minute barrage of searching, probing questions from the
residing reverend of the Lutheran Theological Institute in
Pietermaritzburg before gratefully and graciously accepting the
Urantia Book into his institute's library collection.
-
Free
breakfast plus a one-hundred-Rand donation (about $15) towards
my seeding mission on behalf of the Durban Catholic Diocesan
Chancery in appreciation of their free copy.
-
A personal
audience with the Archbishop of Cape Town who after accepting
his free copy wanted to chat about Mother Teresa whom we had
both known.
-
The Durban
Theosophical Society offering me their premises as a free base
of operations after receiving their copy.
-
The
retired Methodist Bishop of Port Elizabeth, having founded what
is called the Centre for Spirituality, Wholeness and
Reconciliation in neighbouring Humewood, after a long
question-and-answer-session about the book assuring me he will
read it carefully then show it around all his closest colleagues
in the area.
-
The Port
Elizabeth Bible Society freely conceding that the book they had
received could in certain circumstances easily become more use
to them than the Bible.
-
Each
municipal and provincial library system in turn invariably and
enthusiastically offering use of their internal distribution
networks to reliably get as many donated Urantia Books out to as
many of their numerous branch libraries as we'll care to donate
to.
* *
*
These typical examples of recent
experiences of hand seeding the Urantia Book into various learning
centres of South Africa are only a few among many others that could
be mentioned thus far. In fact, with over a quarter of the first
shipment of 480 books already seeded, I have yet to experience even
a single negative encounter whilst presenting the revelation.
It is this somewhat pleasantly
surprising “third-world” openness towards new truth, combined with a
first-world infrastructure and degree of reliability to get books
where they are needed with the added advantage of English being near
universally spoken and understood, that makes South Africa one of
the world's most desirable seeding targets. That South Africa is
both the economic and civilizational powerhouse of the continent,
together with her population centres being such diverse melting
pots, only adds to the case for hand seeding this and surrounding
countries carefully, systematically and thoroughly.
In order for that to happen, however, we
need at the very least another shipment of 500 Urantia books to
Durban in the coming weeks where they will be relayed overland to
Johannesburg where I will await them. Without such, the public
library systems cannot be fully utilized to bring higher truth to
earnest truth seekers, and many learning centres like the ones
alluded to earlier will remain sadly unministered to which, in my
view, would be both a tragedy and a travesty.
A second shipment would fill all the
gaps in South Africa and also enable neigbouring Namibia, Botswana,
Swaziland, Lesotho and Mozambique to be similarly hand-seeded. And
with the seeding of all such countries complete, enough books will
be set aside for the hand seeding of basket-case Zimbabwe with its
8000% inflation and 80% unemployment. (As an ultra-high risk mission
it will naturally be left to last.)
Your fieldworker, as should by now be
well known, is able and willing to remain in the field on an
indefinite basis and as always is daily adapting to the environment
in which he finds himself. The cost and means of shipping and
seeding books here is a known quantity, and enough UB quotes exist
that point to the calm, careful, free and loving presentation of the
fifth epochal revelation to the potential and actual leader/teacher
strata of all races, nations and religions of the world as being
Michael's plan and the Father's will as to make a small book of.
In this light, I
therefore ask you my brethren to please help offset the cost of donation books and/or
to towards the small trickle of funds needed for my daily
living expenses as to allow this all to happen over the coming
months.
In search of the Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield
Nocturne:
A Special Report from Namibia
by Mark Bloomfield
July 15, 2007
If you're one of those far-seeing visionary
types who in their slowly growing numbers are either graciously
supporting or thinking of supporting the Fifth Epochal World
Seeding Mission, you might perhaps gain a new perspective on the
dynamics of these transition occurrences between dispensations
by putting yourself into the shoes of the following person:
You are the rector of Namibia's largest
Protestant theological seminary situated in the quiet southern
outer suburbs of the nation's capital, Windhoek. As if from
nowhere, a tall European figure whom you'd probably remember even
if he'd only come to fix your air conditioner is ushered into
your office whereupon he greets you politely by your name
(however he found that, introduces himself, and explains the
reason for his unexpected visit.
He's courteous but confident and calm, focused
but friendly and articulate enough but in an unrehearsed and
spontaneous way. As a man of the cloth, between the person
before you and what he has brought you, your sixth sense quickly
kicks in and you send word to all your colleagues to immediately
meet in the conference room to which you gently lead your
unexpected though not unwelcome guest.
Ten minutes have elapsed. You and all your
lecturer colleagues are studying several open Urantia Books
whilst seated around a large rectangular conference table, of
which from the centre of its length your guest explains in
animated detail both the gift he has brought together with what
effect such has had upon his own life.
In all that he says, Christian teachings that
you are all too familiar with keep shining through. In
expressing how his experience with the book increased his love
for God and His Son as well as his desire to serve his fellows,
touching upon his subsequent humanitarian background, he
correctly alludes to this as the acid test of the book's
validity: that a bad tree cannot bring good fruit and vice
versa, and for his own part, "by their fruits you shall know
them."
Fair enough also that mention is made how truth
sometimes appears in unorthodox raiment and at any hour not
merely from a passing stranger but that even the highest such
might be uttered by a small child. But whereas non-Christian
religionists and atheists alike might never pick up a Bible, no
such defensive shields are raised against the Urantia Book as a
book of truth which by nonetheless validating all truth that the
Bible contains, thus becomes a potentially powerful untapped
resource for all truth-sensitive Christian denominations.
Questioned as to the book's origins just as tea
and sandwiches were being served, he answered with a flurry of
questions of his own:
"Did God stop loving us 2,000 years ago? And
would He not wish to continue to reveal His love for us as and
when we evolve new capacities to receive such? Would He not want
to fill such new found capacities even to overflowing?"
"God desires all His children to grow in grace
and spiritual maturity."
Holding the milk pot to all present after
topping up his tea, "We cannot keep just taking the milk of
spiritual infancy after growing to the point of needing to part
take of solid food," as he gestured with his eyes to the
sandwiches.
"Besides, show me a Bible reader who doesn't
believe in both miracles and revelation! This book only
continues what pattern was first established in the scriptures
themselves millenia ago."
It was not so much the immediacy of each
forthcoming answer as though he'd been asked the same questions
a thousand times over as much as each being not 'an' answer but
rather 'the' answer . . . the only one he could have given and the
one that went straight through us.
Even quizzed as to his own background,
motivations, how he had arrived here and where his home was, his
answers were revealing:
A simple layman who, having found something he
believes to be true, beautiful and good, and thanks to a
benevolent publisher and a small clutch of generous supporters,
simply enjoys freely and voluntarily sharing such with his
brethren the world over. Without so much as a tent for a
homebase and no vested financial interest in any ultimate
result, a simple pleasure is taken in laying the book before all
nations, races and religions of the world that they might have
their own experience with it.
And when the time eventually came for mutual
parting blessings having left two copies of the book for the
seminary, he departs as he arrived, walking with his day pack on
his shoulders, a good hour's walk back to the city, never to be
seen or heard of again.
* *
*
Whilst any seeding target is only rarely given
two books, the above is otherwise in no way untypical of what
happens on a near daily basis whilst seeding any given country.
Of only 42 copies brought into Namibia (reflective of its tiny
population to land ratio), a whole string of parallel
experiences could have been narrated.
From Windhoek, the four-hour journey across the
Namib Desert to seed the final half dozen books in Swakopmund and Walvis Bay, (hitchhiking to and from the latter
to save on a taxi fare) both on the Atlantic coast, where this
report is now being written. Then, the 35-hour overland haul
this Sunday back to Port Elizabeth via Cape Town to pick up the
last batch of books for the further 20-hour haul to Kimberley in
the Northern Cape, then on to Uppington and Springbok to finish
this the first phase of the southern Africa drop of 480 books.
Immediately thereafter I will have need of a
further 500 books into Durban port for this most essential of
all missions to be able to continue without delay but that can
happen only with your full support so ask your Heavenly Father
in the meantime what He would have you do.
Additionally, with separate funds set aside in
Australia to replicate the free schools model for impoverished
and illiterate children successfully employed in northern India
and to a lesser extent on the Thai-Burma border, I've decided to
hold off for a while until I reach some of Africa's most
hopelessly failed states to which Namibia cannot rightfully
claim to belong.
As for a revelation's seeding, you can see by
the earlier example that once bestowed, things can never be the
same again for any learning centre visited: the revelation,
once found cannot be 'un-found', in as much as you can't change
history.
See here the 'crossover' nature of these
inter-dispensational days as two tectonic plates of world
history uneasily abut one another. As each learning centre is
presented with the revealed truth of a new epoch, one
dispensational clock within each centre stops simultaneous to
the clock of the next immediately starting . . . and quite
indifferent to any human inertial lingerings to the contrary.
A fish. A loaf. Half a bottle of blood-red
wine: the fish supper of common labourers in communion with
their Master and semi-recurrent theme of these the Gardener's
Chronicles.
But whereas labourers of the fourth epoch take
their supper as the closing culmination of their work day, the
labourers of the fifth epoch, being the nocturnal labourers of
the day yet to come, part take of such sustenance not that they
might sleep but instead, that they might work.
Their 'day' has not yet dawned but they labour to
the end that to the Glory of God, the dawn of their day
eventually might come.
In search of the Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield
A Near Fatal Blow
by Mark Bloomfield
August 2,
2007
In a bizarre and
somewhat surreal turn of events I find myself unexpectedly torn away
from my mission temporarily in order to stay out of a South African
jail cell!
It all started a few days ago on the return overnight bus journey
from Windhoek, Namibia, to Cape Town, South Africa. At the South
African immigration post, instead of giving me another 90-day visa
as was up till now standard procedure, they said they didn't do that
any more and that I need to go to the Department of Home Affairs in
Cape Town to apply for an extension to my current visa which expires
just a few days from now on the 5th of August.
On arriving at the aforementioned office the following morning, I
was told that they no longer renew visas and that I have to be out
of the country before my visa expires on the 5th. It wasn't that
they were unsympathetic, but only that the law is the law.
Obviously, the first question I asked was whether I could hop across
a border, say into neighbouring Botswana and come back in again, to
which they responded that I cannot now re-enter from any nation on
the African continent!
Yikes!
With only days to get myself off the continent or face deportation
and/or imprisonment, I rushed to the travel agent with the last of
my emergency funds that I had stashed in a hollow belt and explained
my situation.
Three destinations were about equal in price for a return ticket:
Buenos Aires, London or Bangkok, but knowing I could live cheaper in
northern rural Thailand as well as re-visit the freeschools I had
set up there along the Burmese border last year, I choose the
Bangkok flight and paid the equivilent of $1270 (US) which all but
cleaned me out, having no other funds in the whole wide world as a
reserve after so many years as an unpaid volunteer.
Having resigned myself to the fact that I have just lost my
emergency fund (for which incidentally I don't wish to be
compensated for from money donated to the African seeding project),
the next issue was to decide how long to stay before returning to
South Africa to resume the seeding mission.
As many will know, we are still waiting for a new batch of Urantia
Books to be printed, and that having been so, will need around a
month to arrive by ship to Durban where the first batch arrived.
Knowing that visas cannot be renewed and that there will be a delay
in receiving the next batch, I chose to book my return flight after
slightly less than one month hence in order to avoid using up
precious South African visa time waiting for books to arrive.
In the meantime, the 120 or so remaining books still stored at my
old boarding house in Port Elizabeth are quite safe and the landlady has been notified of this rather infuriating but utterly
unavoidable delay.
As for all those supporting the Africa seeding mission, your
patience and understanding during this awkward interlude will be
deeply appreciated.
All things considered, I did the one thing I had to do in order to
stay in the game, albeit at the crucial loss of my last financial
safety net.
In search of the Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield
The Thing About Paul
by Mark Bloomfield
August 30,
2007
YOUR surest
guarantee that these chronicles have, over the long years,
constituted a perfectly true and accurate record of events
is the mere fact that half the time they're simply too
bizarre to be fiction. Were it not to have actually
happened, you simply couldn't dream it all up.
Briefly to
summarize:
-
Upon my overland re-entry to South Africa
from the eminently successful Namibian seeding run,
Immigration refused me a second 90-day visa due to a
recent change in the law, instead allowing me to
re-enter only on the five or so remaining days my
original 90-day visa had left to run.
-
On applying for a visa extension at the
Immigration Office in Cape Town the following day, I was
informed they no longer extend visas and that if I
wanted a new 90-day visa I had to leave the entire
African continent and re-enter South Africa from a
non-African nation.
-
Between Buenos Aires, London and Bangkok,
the latter was the slightly cheaper option but by far
the smarter one as it meant the freeschools project from
whence I came could be re-visited and more time spent
with Ben Bowler, an Australian UB reader with a growing
interest in the fifth epochal world seeding mission,
who currently runs the freeschools project with his
fiancée on the Thai-Burma border.
-
The $1200 (U.S.) equivalent for the
round-trip ticket to Bangkok took nearly all the last of
my own emergency reserve funds to buy but it meant that
no donated funds for the Africa mission were
touched. Additionally, the 3 weeks away would buy time
for the next batch of seed books to South Africa to get
on their way without my using up valuable visa time to
wait for them to arrive. Upon my arrival in Bangkok,
however, word was received from a group of generous
salt-of-the- Earth types in the southern United States,
who were previously unknown to me (and who prefer to
remain anonymous), who had heard of my plight and
promptly reimbursed me the air ticket price, thus
enabling me to retain, after my Thailand expenses are
met, a small but possibly life-saving emergency
contingency fund upon my return to Africa.
* * *
"Slightly
calamitous but charged and highly creative" might be how one
or two of my relationships with my brethren might be
described, but in Ben's case especially, such also bodes
well for the future of any kingdom-related cooperative
effort we might attempt together.
In such a light,
the fact that during our visit, a minor scooter accident
together broke my left shoulder, snapping the clavicle bone
clean in half, as well as inflicting minor cuts and bruises
on each of us, need not necessarily raise any eyebrows but
instead be as easily half expected and passed off with a
dismissive shrug of the shoulders (broken or unbroken as the
case may be).
Adding still
further to this already heady equation, a few days ago word
was passed to me that 1000 English Urantia Books from Delhi
(that I had spent 6 months in India overseeing the printing
of some years ago), together with 1000 French books, are to
be freely donated to the Africa Seeding Mission.
You therefore
have a lone fieldworker with a few crumpled hundred-dollar
bills between him and the abyss and a broken left shoulder
back in the number two gun crime nation of Earth after Iraq,
seeding the remaining 120 books of the first book shipment.
Beyond that, another 2000 books are coming his way to finish
seeding South Africa as well as all of Africa's remaining
fifty plus nations from Cape Town to Cairo, thence back to
old Jerusalem if all goes well, that intended future
headquarters of the Fifth Epochal World Seeding Mission.
* * *
Hollywood throws
hundreds of millions of bucks at its fictitious fairy tales
of how the world is saved by its swaggering heroes when the
way it will likely be actually saved in real life and
eventually won back for Michael will likely as not be on a
pocketful of loose change and by another rag-tag bunch of
dead losses who couldn't boil an egg between them without
setting fire to the kitchen.
The thing about
Paul two thousand years ago is that, like him or loathe him,
he just never quit. Knowing he was onto something
indescribably big, he just kept going till the bitter end.
And even though
he carried with him only a distorted, adulterated and
incomplete fragment of what we are carrying, the world is a
markedly different place as a result of his efforts.
You just
couldn't script all this any better could you?
What other name
could there be for this mission than 'this game of ghosts?'
In search of the
Father's will,
Mark
Philip Bloomfield
A Mission to Die For
by Mark Bloomfield
September 18,
2007
"Hmm....tricky," your lad of all chores thought to himself
as he gave calm, clinical consideration to his increasingly
precarious situation.
A hundred large
hardcover Urantia Books plus personal luggage, deposited by
the big Afrikaans bus driver on to the pavement of downtown
Kimberley, on a bright Sunday morning after two back-to-back
sleepless overnight bus trips from Cape Town via Port
Elizabeth and Bloemfontain. Left shoulder still out of
action, unarmed with all his cash on him as always, with the
local street life already around him and not believing their
luck.
To the complete
astonishment of the biggest, baddest-looking thug amongst
them, I walked straight up to him, looked him right in the
eye and, pointing to the boxes, told him to watch my luggage
and make sure no one takes anything before I headed off up
the road without even waiting for his response or bothering
to look back.
Not far along
the road I came to a petrol station where a young black guy
was pumping gas. Putting a twenty-Rand note (about $3) into
his empty hand I asked him to call me a cab and, pointing to
where I had left the books, started back for them, again not
waiting for a response.
Ten minutes
later, both the taxi driver and the gas station guy who had
followed me back after a few minutes had loaded all the
books into the taxi whilst my reformed hoodlum friend
faithfully kept watch with the same look of bewilderment on
his face and I was on my way to my next set of four walls
and a bed, staring out of the vehicle's window indifferently
and wondering what to do about lunch.
A good week or
so ensued during which time, in addition to the usual mix of
hand-seeded academic and religious institutions together
with the block seeding of the public library system by
trying to say the right things to the right people, my
recently invented adrenaline sport of
black-township-transiting was further indulged in. Trudging
through such squalid, broken-down slums to get to where I
needed to be, as a lone white man loaded down with books,
always seems to make the heart race and the mouth so dry you
can't swallow, but to emerge unscathed again is to feel
blissfully alive.
Another cramped
overnight bus journey put me back in Port Elizabeth and that
same old rundown boarding house, under the stairwell of
which the revelation has been freely and safely stored all
this time -- a humble little Victorian townhouse that has
over the months taken on something of a shrine to the spirit
of it all.
Monica, the
kindly old landlady of Irish ancestry who lives there, is
one of this world's true characters. Doomed to a life of
incessant turmoil, upheaval and family tragedy, her staunch
Catholic faith always holds her as, doting over me like a
mother hen, she gleans me at every opportunity for all my
experiences with Mother Teresa back in the nineties. Her
husband, Rayhart, as kindly as she but an Alzheimer's
sufferer, forgets me if I'm even away for a few hours and
must, upon my return, be re-convinced he knows me.
Vulnerability....humanity. That is the story the human
response to this revelation will have to tell on High and
across a vast universe. At first glance somewhat pitiful and
pathetic but with a subtle undertone of gentle grace and
dignity just beneath the surface that no modern-day Herod or
Caiaphas could ever sensitize to. Just plain, ordinary folk
like Monica and Rayhart together with all those good people
on the homefront that support this mission faithfully
playing their roles in helping a divine revelation on its
way.
And so before
dawn the next morning, fond hugs of farewell and on with the
last 26 of the first shipment of 480 Urantia Books to dour,
cosmetically-challenged East London four hours up the coast.
A few good seeding days culminating in a wonderful visit
with the lady pastor of the city's Presbyterian Church after
her sermon and that was the end of the first shipment.
Another
overnight bus this time to Johannesburg where thanks to
Tamara and the folks at Urantia Foundation, 200 more books
are soon due to arrive by air from New Delhi where they were
printed some time ago. This batch should keep me busy until
a further 300 arrive some weeks from now by sea to Durban,
putting the running total for Southern Africa at just under
the thousand.
That ought to be
enough to give the whole of Southern Africa including sick
puppy Zimbabwe a light dusting of first-phase fifth epochal
seed.
So vital, so
critically important to the spiritual economy of this planet
is it that the potential and actual leaders and teachers of
all nations, races and religions discover the very highest
revelatory truths out there to be found, that no price --
personal or financial -- can be too high a one to pay to
ensure the success of the Fifth Epochal World Seeding
Mission.
And whatever
final price any genuine fieldworker will end up paying to
stay in this "game of ghosts," the continuing financial
support from the homefront remains crucial to the mission's
success.
We are a team of
equal partners in this most essential service to humanity.
In search of the
Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield.
African Seeding Mission: Brief
Update
by Mark Bloomfield
September 30,
2007
Yesterday afternoon (1st October)
200 Urantia Books arrived at the residence of South African
reader and cherished sister Simone Cox where I am currently
staying in a guest room under Simone's generous invitation,
30 minutes east of Johannesburg.
The books
arrived from new Delhi where they were printed and stored
for some time and are the first 200 of 1000 English books
from the same source allocated to the African Seeding
Mission along with 1000 French from a different source.
Today, Simone
drove me around Jo'burg in her car on this the first seeding
day of the new shipment which culminated in the first 15
books being hand seeded which would otherwise have been
seeded on foot. Needless to say, being chauffeur-driven
around seeding targets is something I would not have much
difficulty in getting used to but alas, will not last
forever!
The publisher
who air-freighted us the 200 as a stop-gap estimate that it
would take another 70 days for the next shipment of 300
books to arrive in South Africa by sea: far too long to give
me any visa time to seed them while air-freighting again,
though much quicker, is prohibitively expensive.
Obviously a
change in plans was called for, so I notified New Delhi to
ask them to send by sea the 300 to Mombasa, Kenya, instead
of to South Africa which will give me ample visa time to
seed what books I have here across all those difficult and
time-consuming targets in southern Africa, then journey to
East Africa to collect the 300 arriving there by sea. If I
time the second 300 book shipment correctly, I should be
able to return from the East African seeding leg back to
South Africa to immediately finish the southern African leg.
The remaining 200 English of the 1000 allocated will be used
to fill in across West and North Africa a little further
down the road.
Visa constraints
periodically come in the way of my preferred plans but with
the continued support from the home front will never alter
the final result. All Africa stands to be seeded so
whichever order it is seeded in hardly matters.
What does matter
in my view is how this whole episode demonstrates to one and
all just how effective a team effort this entire mission is
becoming. As a fieldworker, it's all too easy to rave and
enthuse about all the positive and memorable experiences
that take up my days, most of all the human interaction
between myself and those I present the revelation to, but
none of this will ever happen if those loyal "homesteaders" from across the full width of this movement's spectrum ever
once failed to "believe without seeing" which at the end of
the day calls for a more profound form of faith than my own.
In search of the
Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield.
Under the Greenwood Tree
by Mark Bloomfield
October 21,
2007
"It is advisable and
highly recommended to always have your 'panic button
remote' and 'pepper spray device' in your hands upon
leaving the lodge."
--an exact quote from the info sheet issued by
the backpacker lodge in Johannesburg where I'm currently
staying.
* * *
"Give me your
money. I won't ask again!" threatened the street thug,
having pestered me for money for several minutes without
success, whilst one of his friends, taking an interest,
started approaching from the opposite direction.
Gesturing with
my left hand to calm down, I held in the other my steel
retractable baton in my rear right pocket which was poised
for immediate use at the first sight of a weapon. The
resident of the Quaker house of worship came out and opened
the gate just in the nick of time to spirit me through into
a room and a welcome cup of tea. It was the morning the
Quaker "Society of Friends" truly earned their name.
An hour earlier,
the secretary of the District Grand Lodge of South Africa, a
fellow of the most genteel and splendid sort, had given me
the full tour of the lavish Freemason's Hall as part of one
of the most rewarding visits I had so far enjoyed in
Johannesburg. As a result, two Urantia Books were left with
him for the Lyceum Lodge of Research, the research arm of
the Masonic movement that will likely as not publish a
research paper on the book's contents, as well as additional
papers on the text potentially being written by prospective
Masonic candidates as part of their initiation process.
All in all, no
trifling matter when one pauses to consider that the current
worldwide membership of the Masonic movement stands in
excess of 36 million.
These last two
weeks had been spent seeding greater Johannesburg entirely
on foot from a small backpacker lodge in an inner suburb
called Yeoville that in recent years had experienced a
demographic shift as to render mine virtually the only white
face in the neighbourhood. My memory of it will be Jacaranda
trees in radiant, full-violet bloom lining streets of
discarded rubbish, broken glass and cold, icy stares. (The
very day this report was written the cleaning lady at my
lodge was robbed nearby at knifepoint by two thugs.)
Each day's
twenty- to twenty-five kilometer hike through what is
statistically the world's second most violent city has been
to tread the uneasy line between that polarization of
humanity on either sides of razor wire, electric fences and
"armed response" security warning signs. But it seems that
the worse a state-of-siege human beings are forced to live
and suffer under, the more touched they are when a benign
and well-meaning stranger suddenly drops by to leave with
them a potentially life-changing gift before departing just
as abruptly. As a fifth epochal fieldworker in this kind of
environment, one gets to enjoy witnessing this heartwarming
sort of response each and every day:
-
. . .
standing in the drizzle one morning at the gate of an
Orthodox Jewish academy with an Orthodox Chief Rabbi
(complete with long beard and black hat) as we related
so well together in reciprocal tones of fraternal
brotherhood as to not want to part each other's company;
-
. . . a long
visit at the Jesuit Institute to be received with much
interest and many thought-provoking questions;
-
. . . a
bewildered but grateful librarian at Hillbrow Public
Library (Jo'burg's most dangerous inner suburb of all)
asking how I really made it to his library, reluctant to
believe that as a white man I had actually risked
walking there on foot.
Another full
week should break the back of Johannesburg, then another
week or so to take nearby Pretoria before hauling overland
to neighbouring Botswana the remaining books of the recent
shipment of 200. Any overspill from Botswana will be used to
start seeding Zambia on my way overland through the 'heart
of darkness' to Mombasa, Kenya, where another 300 Urantia
Books will by then have hopefully arrived by sea.
In addition to
the bare facts and statistics of the fifth epochal World
Seeding Mission, there perhaps might be seen here something
of a story to tell, but it's ever a fieldworker's dilemma as
to how much or little of it to attempt to communicate to the
Urantia community. To offer too little might be taken as
being incommunicative and unsociable whilst to offer too
much might appear boastful and self-congratulatory. Striking
a sensible balance between the two has over the years always
been my aim.
Either way, be
assured that the accomplishment of the mission itself, for
me at least, takes overwhelming priority to merely writing
about it. To that end, the wise and far-seeing souls out
there who constitute this mission's support base should be
comforted by the fact that their hard-earned funds firstly
reach me safely, secondly are profoundly appreciated, and
thirdly are slowly but surely causing a tectonic shift for
the better in the entire planetary status quo. That, dear
reader, is no idle boast. It's happening. Nothing else can
happen when the systematic person-to-person bestowal of the
highest revealed truths mortal ears can ever hear takes
place in the multitudinous learning centres of whole nations
and across whole continents.
But regular
light-hearted banter with the Australians -- the heaven-sent
humourists of this movement -- affords light and refreshing
relief from the enormity and immensity of the issues at
hand. How I'd manage without them I really have no clue.
That and any good book I can find for an hour's escapism
each evening:
"One of
Thomas Hardy's most greatly loved and gentlest books,
Under The Greenwood Tree is an unashamed idyll and
picturesque portrait of the long-vanished pastoral society
of early Victorian England," -- so it says on the rear
cover of my latest find.
Ah, yes. That'll
do. That'll do nicely!
In search of the
Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield.
It's a Laugh
by Mark Bloomfield
vember 15,
2007
With 680 Urantia
Books now in place across South Africa, Namibia and
Botswana, 300 more arriving by sea in Mombasa, Kenya any day
now and a further 300 arriving in Durban, South Africa, a
month or two from now, the 1280 books when seeded across all
of southern and eastern Africa will represent roughly the
halfway mark of the entire African Seeding Mission.
Another year beyond that should be enough to clear up
northern and western Africa, then 8 months to seed 1000
Portuguese across Brazil and 6 months for 1000 Italian
across Italy but all that only so long as the steady support
from the home front continues.
Johannesburg with its stratospheric violent crime rate was
always going to be either the city that would get clobbered
or that would clobber me. As things turned out, when the
dust finally settled, a thumping 129 books had been
individually hand-seeded within its city limits. Whilst the
vast majority of targets were seeded on foot, the last
outlying targets remaining on the very last day Simone Cox,
our South African reader friend, kindly chauffeured me to in
her car.
A few days in Pretoria covering some of the more important
bases in conjunction with the block seeding of the city's
public library system then by bus with the remaining books
to Gaborone, Botswana's diminutive capital city. With a
total nationwide population of just 1.6 million, all
important targets centered in Gaborone plus the fact that
Botswana makes even South Africa seem cheap to live in, I
needed to quickly do my business and get out of there, which
is exactly what happened.
Gaborone was accordingly trounced in two days dead. After
Jo'burg, taking the city was like kicking over a
bucket-sized sandcastle on the beach with a steel toe-capped
boot. Tea and biscuits with Brother Brendan at the
Passionist's Meditation Centre and a wonderful visit at the
library of the madrasa adjoining the city's central mosque
helped make my short sojourn in the country all the more
enjoyable.
It's the evening of the third day and we've got to get out
of this place. It's really expensive. On to the overnight
train to Francistown near the Zimbabwe border then,
bleary-eyed, straight on to a bus for the all-day journey to
Kasane, the small northern-border village with Zambia on the
banks of the Zambezi River. No rooms available anywhere and
getting dark, but finally, finding an empty tent for the
night right on the riverbank, I collapsed in a heap to the
sound of the gruntings and oinkings of disgruntled hippos
and the full accompanying extra-terrestrial symphony of the
African wild.
Up at dawn, unshaven and looking rather pathetic, I walked,
bag on shoulder, past the quizzical stares of the emerging
khaki-clad safari-goers with their myriad safari accessories
and gizmos and on to the road, to slowly disappear in the
direction of the border. A couple of miles down the road an
African guy stopped to give me a lift the rest of the way.
Over the Zambezi on the free ferry and into Zambia after
paying $70 for the visa, then into the back of a share taxi
to Livingstone some 50 miles up the road with a beautiful
young African woman called Monica for company and who I
ended up spending an enchanting evening with later that day.
Booked on to the bus to Lusaka, Zambia's scruffy little
capital two days hence and with a few hours to kill that
following day, I took advantage of a cheap seat in a
share-taxi for the 5-mile trip to the Victoria Falls just
for the heck of it. Walking alone just a few feet from the
vertical precipice into the Vic Falls, two vicious looking
thugs suddenly sprang up from the bushes and tried to block
my escape away from the cliff face to my immediate right.
With all my cash on me I had to make an immediate decision.
With a flash vision of disappearing into the Victoria Falls
with a headlocked thug under each arm in my mind's eye, what
is known in military doublespeak as an "expedited tactical
withdrawal" was conducted. A few minutes later the
retaliation came in my leading two machine-gun-toting police
officers jogging behind me by which time, of course, my
would-be attackers had made good a tactical withdrawal of
their own.
Give the devil his due, backing me up to the edge of the
Victoria Falls no less was a nice touch and could have made
for a rather colourful exit from the world stage. Sometimes
in this peculiar line of work you can almost sense the heat
signature of the enemy's nearness but always at such times
you become faintly aware of the hare-like alertness of the
seraphic presences. Consciously aspire to become the one
human being that Caligastia would want to kill and you never
need worry about life ever becoming dull again.
Back to Livingstone, a couple of petty extortion attempts at
my doorstep by the local crime gang then off to Lusaka only
to break down 10 miles down the road. A replacement bus an
hour later finally got me into Lusaka at dusk from where
this report is being written.
Recovering well
from a couple of days of poor health as a result of drinking
vile, rusty tap water for too long, a poor diet and a lack
of sleep, but thankfully the temperature I was running and
the aching joints don't look like developing into malaria
which concerned me as I had started my malaria tablets a tad
late.
Booked on to the slow train to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania two
days from now and waiting to receive the visa from the
Tanzanian Embassy which meant another $50. Once in Dar Es
Salaam I'll be back on home turf as such was my home base
during my bush pilot years. From there, the relatively short
bus trip to Mombasa, Kenya to hopefully pick up the 300
books from the port there for the East African leg of the
mission, and doubtless another string of ensuing reasons to
be cheerful and laugh my way through life on this sacred
plot, this sceptered isle called Urantia -- sentimental
favourite world across a vast universe.
In search of the Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield.
"Space Meets African Time"
by Mark Bloomfield
December 18,
2007
One bright sunny
day, Africa will doubtless be awash with locally-printed
native-language Urantia Books and abuzz with thriving study
groups too numerous to ever bother trying to count.
To reach that
day from this, however, is going to take time, effort, money
and the stoic, gritty determination of both fieldworkers and
the homefront alike. Just like the early pioneer settlers
trudging west across North America, the World Seeding
Mission, as relatively quick and cheap as it is, doesn't
have as its reason for being the breaking of any speed or
cost efficiency records. That kind of task would fall more
to those who follow in as much that before maps can be read
from they must first be written.
Having seeded
the last books of the current shipment into Botswana, the
long overland haul to Mombasa, Kenya, on the east coast
where 300 more books were soon due to arrive from India by
sea. The previous update having been written in Lusaka,
Zambia, a rickety old chicken bus whisked me four hours
north to a tiny outpost village called Kapiri Mposhi that
enjoyed that singular redeeming quality of being at the
beginning of that useable portion of railway track that
extends from Lusaka to Dar Es Salaam on the coast of
Tanzania.
"Snails move
faster" was the exact phrase used by one travel guide in
dismissing the oily old locomotive that met my gaze on the
track as it quietly burbled to itself with cheerfully
demented indifference. To their credit however, both proud
boasts of the rail authority ultimately proved perfectly
true. . . .
Departure time:
as per schedule almost to the second.
Arrival time: some time next week.
Oh God I love
this job!
The symmetry of
it is perfect. A mission of planetary and in a certain sense
even super-planetary significance, a model of functional
unity and teamwork in loving and unselfish social service,
the exotic backdrops and occasional high thrills of an
action movie interspersed with a semi-regular supply of
rollicking good laughs!
True to form,
exactly 53 hours later the iron snail crawled to a halt at
Dar Es Salaam train station and your fieldworker quietly
vanished into the Arab quarter of the city he once long ago
used to call home. A fifty-dollar Kenyan visa the next day,
then off on a smoky old bus northwards to the town of Tanga
for the night. Next morning, another cramped chicken bus
across the Tanzania/Kenya border and finally into Mombasa
later that day.
* * *
(Mombasa. Ah
yes. Another colourful memory from way back in my pre-UB
seeding days of aimless travel. Only dropping in there for
nothing more than a gin, a few days later saw me perched on
the bowsprit of a 14,000 ton Russian 'Jadroplov Lines' cargo
ship on a two week passage to the mouth of the Suez Canal in
Egypt. As we exited the port one evening around dusk, the
huge foghorn behind me started bellowing in that
intermittant way you'd honk your car horn at an old friend.
In reciprocation, all the, er, less than savoury bars shall
we say along the headland that sailors tend to frequent to
indulge in their respective vices started flashing their bar
lights on and off which made me glance back at the ship's
bridge with a worldly grin. A quaint nautical custom around
these parts I later learned and far too jolly an anecdote to
not find a brief mention in these chronicles.)
* * *
Linking up with
the agent whose details appeared on the shipment's bill of
lading, it was explained that although the books had already
arrived in port, the consignment had not been sent from the
sender in India as a "door-to-door" shipment as I had
specifically requested but as a normal shipment instead.
When simple instructions like this don't get followed in a
third-world environment, the space-time continuum abruptly
ceases, "Indian time" or "African time" immediately kicks in
and a bureaucratic nightmare usually ensues. Sure enough,
only now am I expecting the final essential original
document to arrive from India by courier that should
theoretically make the books' final clearance a mere
formality -- though that said, we're now getting
uncomfortably close to the Christmas holidays.
All that can be
done right now is being done, and as and when the books
finally clear no time at all will be lost in hand-seeding
them first to the west as far as blood-spattered little
Rwanda then southwards down East Africa to put me back into
South Africa so as to collect another shipment of 300 books
currently in transit. When those are seeded across what
remains of southern Africa that is yet to be covered, that
should bring us roughly to the half way stage of the entire
African mission and mean around two metric tons of Urantia
Books are in place.
A smallish
though significant enough portion of a fifth epochal
fieldworker's year is usually taken up either in transit or
in coaxing books through customs or waiting for someone else
to. It comes with the territory at this still early stage of
the revelation's evolution. But keep in mind here that all
the while such a fieldworker is living out of cheap guest
houses and backpacker lodges, feeding himself at cheap
eating houses and going straight to bed shortly after it
gets dark so no extravagant hotel or travel bills ever get
run up.
And as it looks
like the holiday season will be weathered here in the bowels
of Mombasa, it is from his small room in a little guest
house down a relatively quiet backstreet of the inner city
that your cheerful co-worker in this big, beautiful and
world-uplifting mission of ours sends his warmest and
heartiest seasonal greetings to one and all for the holiday
season.
My heartfelt
thanks as always for your big-hearted support, peace be upon
you and God bless you all.
In search of the
Father's will,
Mark Philip Bloomfield.
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