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“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.
ll 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
November 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.ecovering 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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