Gog and Magog: The Devil’s Descendants

My new political fantasy thriller novel, Gog and Magog will be published in July of 2011. The book video trailer which I just posted can be viewed on Messiah Blogs of the Shechinah Third Temple website. Although I wrote a novel, the bblical prophecies of Gog and Magog are nonfiction and are destined to come true in the Messianic Age at the End of Days. In this fictional account, an American President and his son Cain represent evil and are descendants of the Devil who is alive and well in Washington DC. Only a modern day Abel can stop the evil Cain. However he needs the help of the archangels Gabriel and Michael under the direction of God in order to defeat Satan. The book takes you from the time that Satan was a fallen angel through the Garden of Eden to present day and a few years into the future.

Tags: 666, Adam and Eve, Add new tag, Angels Gabriel and Michael, Antichrist, Biblical Prophecies, Cain and Abel, End of Days, Garden of Eden, God, Good and Evil, Messiah, Messianic Age, miracles, President of the United States, Satan, Third Temple, Washington DC

If you are a person of faith like I am, you know that the future of life as we know it will ultimately come to an end which will mark a beginning. God has a plan and His plan moves forward whether we acknowledge it or not. Although God is no longer on our public stage, He has never relinquished His stewardship of our world.

According to the Hebrew Bible, the End of Days can come about in two ways. The human race can enter the Messianic Age peacefully and harmoniously in man’s time frame or apocalyptically and cataclysmically with fire and brimstone in God’s time frame.

Given the state of hatred in the world and the intolerance and inhumanity of man toward man, it seems more and more likely that a destructive ending will give way to a new beginning. Many have tried to pinpoint the date of our ending; however, the truth is that nobody actually knows. It is, as they say, in God’s “Hands.”

What we do understand from biblical readings of the Hebrew prophets is that those who survive the apocalypse and who are fortunate to be admitted into a second Garden of Eden will be purified in their hearts and given a new spirit by God. Some

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biblical scholars see this not as an end to free will but as a period of time when we shall know God as the waters of the sea.

In the New Testament, the biblical writings indicate that Jesus will return as the Messiah and destroy the antichrist. In the Old Testament, as written in the prophetic books of Ezekiel, Zecharia and Joel and in the Book of Daniel, a Jewish Messiah, who is a descendant of King David, leads God’s charge. However, it is God Who is the real hero Who saves Israel when all seems hopeless and lost.

According to the biblical prophesies, Israel can therefore only survive with God’s help. Why? Because God chose Israel and more specifically the Jewish people to be His nation of Priests to bring Holiness to the rest of the world.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the prophet Ezekiel wrote about our present world where most Jews would give up their Covenant with God; yet, God would still uphold His end of the Covenant and save and redeem the Jewish people. We seem to be at that time point now, as according to surveys only 30 percent of Jews believe in a Supreme Being.

That doesn’t make these non-believers bad people. Moreover, can they really be faulted for their disbelief, since God is no longer on the public stage of our world as He was back in biblical times? People need concrete associations.

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In biblical times, God was the God of both Heaven and Earth.  When the First and Second Temples were destroyed, we lost God to Heaven. He shall not return to assume His dual role until the Third Temple is built at the End of Days and we enter the Messianic Age.

The Book of Daniel speaks about Daniel’s dream of four kingdoms represented by four beasts. Out of the beast of the fourth kingdom, which is the Roman Empire, are ten horns, and among the ten horns comes an eleventh all powerful smaller horn. We know that Christianity has evolved out of the Roman Empire. The key to the apocalypse, in my opinion, is the small horn which if you wish you can liken to the antichrist.

The ten horns according to some Jewish scholars are a metaphor for ten Muslim nations who, with the active encouragement of other world nations, will attack Israel at the End of Days. However, the little horn is the real leader and he or she has been suggested to have Christian and/or Muslim ancestry. This leader may not even realize that he is the leader until it’s too late to reverse a decision that he has made to cause worldwide calamity.

Not that we can alter the tides of history; however, it would be important to examine any radical global changes that would cause the destabilization of Israel, if only to give us warning of what’s coming. These changes could be of an economic, political or military nature. They could also come about if Israel’s main

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supporter, the United States, were to take any foreign policy approach which would weaken Israel.

All parties seeking a Middle East peace agreement should not base the price of peace on appeasement of those who do not value human life and who falsely murder in the name of God. Remember Winston Churchill. He defined appeasement as feeding the sharks in the hope that you will be eaten last.

God decided to pass his spiritual covenant to the Jews and the Jews have paid the price with so many lives lost over the centuries. Jews were not chosen because they were better than anyone else. When the Covenant was made between God and the Jewish people, there were only idol worshipping nations whom God realized would never change their ways.

At the time, there were no Christians or Muslims. Jews were the first grandchild. Christians and Muslims were supposed to be the second and third grandchildren. The rest of the world were never supposed to be monotheistic but would become so at the End of Days when God would once again be the God of Heaven and Earth.

Can one be a humanist and be spiritual without believing in God? Absolutely! Being spiritual means that you activate a flame of pure spirit inside of you that brings out the best in you and endows you with goodness and truthfulness in your heart. Being spiritual means you possess a desire to lead a meaningful life beyond the material norms of our world.

Belief in God ignites a Divine spark that He placed and purposely hid inside your soul. If you don’t believe in God, you won’t call this a Divine spark, but your spirituality must come from somewhere because not everyone is spiritual. My own personal belief is that it’s the same spark whether you believe in God’s spirituality or your own.

Regardless of belief system, being spiritual means that you don’t have to flaunt yourself and thrust your ego upon others. Others see the spirituality in you, almost immediately upon meeting you. There is no need for one-upmanship, and humility automatically and gradually replaces self-promotion as you advance on the spiritual road.

What is the common ground among all those who have adopted spirituality? Doing for others in addition to yourself is a prerequisite in any human ascent. You gain a sense of self worth

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and feel good about yourself. However, there is more. Spirituality gives rise to an appreciation and gratefulness for life’s gifts and the beauty of nature that surrounds us. There is a respect for all human beings providing they have a mutual respect for you, no matter their station in life.

On being spiritual will help you gain entrance into a second Garden of Eden, the Messianic Age, prophesied to come at the End of Days. Spirituality is the first step to being happy as it affords you the opportunity to create your own happiness. Therapy can offer inner peace but only if it is accompanied by spirituality.

If you can get all of the above without God, why do you need God? Take two persons of equal spirituality, one a humanist and the other a believer in the Divine. What’s the difference?  A biblical commentator wrote, “God offers fragrance to all but His wine is reserved for those who are righteous and wish to be guided by Him.”

The wine means that you can expect and even demand God’s help. If you don’t believe, why would you ask for God’s help, never mind expect it? The wine allows you to receive Ruach Hakodesh, a kind of Holy Wind.  From the wisdom of King Solomon in the Book of Proverbs, Ruach Hakodesh is granted to individuals who are using their own efforts and intelligence and receive Divine help, guidance, and inspiration in order to enhance their accomplishment in furthering the Divine plan for humankind.

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When you are spiritual, you ought not let your spiritual passion exceed your earthly common sense. You need do for yourself as God helps those who help themselves. Some time ago, I said to a doctor that I was leaving my fate to God when I didn’t want to follow his instructions. He looked me squarely in the eye and said, “You do realize Jerry that God made doctors for a reason.” I knew then and there that the time to ask for help is after you have exhausted all other avenues. That’s the time to lay the problem at God’s “Feet.” We also learn from King Solomon that the wise man seeks counsel.

Faith in God helps you on your spiritual journey because if God recognizes your efforts at righteousness, He is there with you assisting you as you slide backwards. Acting righteously means that your non-moral outcomes are determined by your moral decisions.

Belief in God does have one pitfall. You may, as Mother Theresa did, have doubt during your lifetime in your faith, especially  when you see inactivity from God despite your constant prayers. One spiritual experience can transform all of this doubt and convert your uncertainty into certainty and unshakable faith. In the Bible, Moses in apparent disagreement asks God why He did what He did. God responds, I shall show mercy and kindness to whomever I please, even to a sinner who is undeserving. I know from personal experience because I am that sinner.

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Unshakable faith also means that not only God can but God will; for example, in curing you of a doctor pronounced terminal illness. The tense of the verb is a progression up the spiritual ladder.

A final thought has to do with wisdom. It is thought that our intellectual capacity utilizes only up to 5 percent of our brain. Wisdom on the other hand allows you to tap into the remaining 95 percent. We have only our human brains to work with, but over time our human brains are filled with all sorts of creative and wise thoughts as we pursue an understanding of the Divine.

Wisdom is not intelligence. Nor is it street smarts. In the Bible, Job said it best, “Days speak and a multitude of years teach wisdom.” Wisdom comes from the spirituality of the soul and the soul resides in the brain as well as the heart.

God has given us the gift of free will. We need to use the gift wisely. Practicing any type of spirituality is better than doing nothing. Remember, God sees all and is watching.

The Patriarch Jacob had a dream where he found God, as angels scurried up and down a Ladder to Heaven. What does one find if one finds God? Almost three thousand years ago, King Solomon wrote God’s answer in his Book on Proverbs. “I love those who love Me, and those who search for Me shall find Me. For one who finds Me has found life.”

Can God find you before you find Him? Yes, He found Abraham, Jacob’s grandfather, and gave him the task of initiating monotheism. He found Moses and told him to lead the ancient Israelites out of Egyptian slavery and then bring them to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. Jacob, Solomon, Abraham, and Moses were imperfect human beings like we all are; however, with gentle commands and nudging from God, they began their separate journeys on the Spiritual Ladder. They clung to Heaven as they grappled with everyday problems that confronted them in biblical times.

What did King Solomon mean about finding life? Solomon was describing a feeling of inner security knowing that God is with you. This emergence of positive feelings starts with igniting a Divine spark of spirituality, which God purposely hid inside you so that you could experience the joy of discovering it on your own.

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As the spark grows into a flame, your security also grows and you feel an inner warming glow and realize that you no longer belong entirely to yourself. Life takes on a different meaning, a spiritual meaning, as you now also belong to God and He to you, in something akin to a loving marriage.

From this point forth, you may feel alone but you never are, as God is always with you. If you ever have felt that you are leading a meaningless life, like a bump on a log, you won’t any longer if you ignite your flame of pure spirit, and once lit you stay the course and continue to march toward spirituality.

Spirituality is like God’s Burning Bush shown to Moses who was in awe because the Bush was a miracle and was not consumed by the fire. If you attain spirituality, you will be more precious than gold in God’s “Eyes.” Spirituality will change you for the eternity and will become the foundation for happiness in your life.

In my humble opinion, religion does not offer salvation. Spirituality does. Religion can if it is part of your spirituality. As the Prophet Isaiah spoke for God, “These people draw near with their mouth, they honor Me with their lips but their heart is far from Me.” A religious person without spirituality is self-righteous and not righteous. A spiritual person has truth and honesty and goodness in his heart.

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How does one ignite the spark to begin the climb up the spiritual ladder? One way that continues to work for me is to simply take short solitary walks and talk out loud to God. Ask Him for strength, for help, or whatever you need. Try this every day for three months and see if God has answered any of your requests. Notice any small changes in your life. If He has answered even one of your wishes, God has seen something worthy in you now or He sees potential in you in the future. Congratulations, you have begun your spiritual journey.

If nothing has happened after three months, then God has examined the crevices of your mind and seen into your heart and isn’t particularly happy with who you are as a person and the moral decisions you have made in your life. Some of that may justly be attributable to your dysfunctional or secular upbringing; however, you still have the power to change yourself and improve your character. We all start at different points in time affected by our pasts, but the hand we are dealt should not stop us.

It’s time to put a plan into action. First and foremost, read the Ten Commandments and do your best to follow them. God doesn’t expect perfection. He only expects that we will walk toward perfection. After all He made us imperfect as King David states in the Book of Psalms, “And He realized that we are but flesh.” Even small improvements will be noticed Above.

Despite arguments to the contrary, the Ten Commandments are spiritual and not religious. They stand alone on their own and can

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be separated out from the religion of Judaism. They embrace the fundamental civility of humankind, or at least they should to each of us. Nobody has the right to hurt you, whether it be physical, emotional or mental abuse, and you have no right to hurt them.

Empower yourself. Be charitable. If you do not help the pauper when he cries out to you, God will not hear you when you cry out to Him.  If you cannot afford giving money, then offer mercy and kindness through your words and show compassion. Do a kind deed every other day even if you don’t want to, and even if it’s only a smile to a stranger in need. Try to be as sincere in your heart as you can possibly be as God values truth more than anything else. Don’t cheat or steal in business or in life and be honest with yourself about your moral actions. Treat others with respect and be grateful for what you have. We often look elsewhere while we have what we are searching for right in our own backyard.

Take baby steps and do some or all of the above. After a couple of months working on improvement of your character, try the walks again and talk to God. In fact, never stop talking to Him. You may notice that something feels different inside and that it is flowing outward from you as an intangible, invisible, magical force.

The power of the force lies in bestowing humility and goodness on all who choose to make the climb up Jacob’s Ladder. As you ascend higher and higher, you become a kindred spirit and

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beacon of hope for all those within and outside your inner circle of family and friends.

A biblical commentator once wrote, “Without Einstein we would not have an understanding of our world. Without God, we would not have a world.” Most of us would agree on the Einstein part of this statement but many of us would disagree on the God part. How then can we argue the case for God if He isn’t willing to be a witness in His own defense?

The premise of monotheism and faith is that God is omnipotent, all powerful of infinite intelligence; omniscient or all knowing; and omnipresent as He was, He is and He will be and He is therefore not subject to time or space. God Himself tells us through the prophet Isaiah, “As the heavens are higher than earth, My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts are higher than your thoughts.” How much higher? Man is limited in that he can on his own only achieve the possible, but God is limitless as He accomplishes the impossible.

Einstein is also attributed to saying, “We cannot find the solution to a problem at the level at which the problem was created.” The human brain is powerless to understand God’s Essence, which may not be fair since the human brain is all we have. We don’t believe what we can’t see or can’t experience, and therefore the human intellect can prevent us from believing in God or cheers us on to uncertainty and disbelief and perhaps to even become anti-God.

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Creation according to ancient Jewish scholars began with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden 5,770 years ago while Evolution started 3.8 billion years ago when the first microorganisms mysteriously appeared on earth. In man’s limited view, therefore, Creation and Evolution are different. However, if we could accept God as the master scientist and see through God’s “eyes”, then the Seven Days of Creation and the billions of years of Evolution are the same, mirror images of each other. The human brain normally seeks to differentiate time. God is not bound by time and sees these very different time periods as the same.

God’s miracles cannot be explained by science. He uses His infinite wisdom to stimulate man’s intellectual interpretations in life. We could easily solve our unemployment problems if God were at the helm, since He has created a plethora of occupations here on earth by creating a dynamic diverse world. He gave us emotions and a brain that fantastically allows us to fantasize. He gave us the gift of free will and we can doubt even God the giver.

After the Flood some 4,213 years ago (according to Josephus the Jewish biblical historian), God tells Noah that He never again will destroy all of humanity because man is evil in the imagery of his heart from his youth. To clarify, the Flood takes place in the then civilized world as humans outside this geography of the Middle East have long evolved and lived as species of Darwin’s evolution. With the miraculous Creation of Adam and Eve 5,770 years ago, God begins geographical civilization just as He jumpstarts evolutionary civilization 3.8 billion years ago and the universe approximately 14 billion years ago. It wasn’t until some 900

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years after the Flood that God begins spiritual civilization, and the hopes of any possibility of any civilization, with the giving of the Ten Commandments to the ancient Israelites at Mount Sinai.

The Ten Commandments level the playing field of good and bad in bringing good into balance with the evil imagery in man’s heart. The Garden of Eden is looked upon in Christianity as the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. The sin is of such magnitude that Christians cannot atone for their sins. Only Jesus can do this through his dying on the Cross and his ultimate resurrection as the Messiah. Orthodox Judaism too believes in the Original Sin although Jews believe that sin can be defeated in one’s lifetime or at least kept at bay. All may be a metaphor, but the beliefs of both Christians and Jews lay the blame for sin at the doorstep of imperfect humankind because God is good, perfect, and free of sin.

What if we accepted a third possibility where God can still be good, perfect and free of sin? What if God used an evil serpent, Satan, to entice Eve to commit the sin of eating fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? What if the Garden of Eden not only represents the gift or the curse of Free Will, but also the creation of imperfection? Does God have a duplicitous role or has God always sought not to be a puppeteer but a partner with humans in the covenant enterprise? What would be God’s purpose? Could it be to create a more perfect union?

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It does make sense to create imperfect beings to give them the opportunity in their lifetimes to become less imperfect and strive through good moral choices and decisions in life to be better persons. However, what’s the angle? The reward is God’s fail-safe plan for humanity whereby we live again in a second Garden of Eden, the Messianic Age at the End of Days. It’s an age of hope, not despair or Armageddon, where spiritual life begins for all of civilization including for resurrection of the dead.

There is one more lesson to be learned from the first Garden of Eden. God made Adam and Eve accountable for their sin. They were commanded to leave the Garden of Eden, an act which symbolized human struggle. It is promised that with the coming of a Third Temple on earth and a Messiah to lead God’s charge, redemption of a second Garden of Eden will be eternal because God will purify our hearts and instill in us a new spirit without the evil inclination.

If you were judging yourself and taking accountability for your moral choices in life, do you think you would be accepted into the Messianic Age? Have you been a good and righteous person? What if God were the scorekeeper?

Through the words of the prophet Jeremiah, we read, “I am God who examines the heart and inspects the recesses of the mind.” Whether you believe in God or not, what’s in your heart will determine whether you enter bliss or not. Religion will not save you unless it’s part of your spiritual goodness. A religious person

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may well be self-righteous and not righteous. Isaiah’s words accurately describe God’s feelings, “These people draw near to Me with their mouth. They honor Me with their lips but their heart is far from Me.”

Is it worth it to improve your character? Only you can answer that. The Messianic Age will be a time of peace and harmony, a time of healing of diseases, a time of abundance of food, shelter and clothing, and yes even a time of useful employment and contribution to society. Most important, life will be so long that it will seem like an eternity. Will you be there?

May the Shechinah (Divine Presence) be with you.

NUTRITION: Some of What I Have Learned

A Personal Opinion

Rationale for Writing a Nutrition Article?

I’m supposed to be promoting my books, Divinely Inspired: Spiritual Awakening of a Soul and Messiah Interviews: Belonging to God, but we live in difficult economic times where selling books may not be possible and may also not be what I should be worrying about. Maybe being created in God’s image means that I’m supposed to be writing articles on different subjects from my life experiences, which have the possibility of helping people. The messages of my books were never about money and I feel quite comfortable in sharing without any personal agenda or personal gain. If you come away with just one thing from this article that helps you, then I shall have accomplished my goal. They say that the best things in life are free. God is free, so why shouldn’t my articles be free as well. I feel like I am walking the walk in what I write in my books by sharing.

My Beginnings with Holistic Medicine

Holistic medicine is everything that lies outside of Western conventional allopathic medicine. I can’t possibly write on such a breadth of alternative health, nor am I qualified. My background and training is as a logical rational trained research scientist, a world where anything of value must be proven by double blind experimentally sound scientific studies.

In 1991, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. This is quite unusual to have at age 50, as this disease, or Manic Depression as it is also called, usually doesn’t strike past the age of 40. I was in clinical depression when my wife Marcia dragged me into Manhattan from our home on Long Island about an hour and a quarter drive by car. A friend of hers, our insurance agent Jerry, suggested that the Atkins Center could help. Robert Atkins M.D. died recently, but back in 1991 he had a five or six storied building that was devoted to what he termed Complementary Medicine. Complementary meant that the good Dr. Atkins was adding certain holistic medical approaches to his internal medicine cardiology traditional training. Upon arrival early in the morning, I was given a 5 hour blood glucose tolerance to determine whether I was either hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) or hyperglycemic (possibly diabetic), blood was withdrawn for a variety of analyses, stool samples were collected, and food and other allergies were tested.

By the end of the day, I had a bag full of vitamins, was told that I had yeast in my intestinal tract, and went on the Atkins high protein, low carbohydrate diet. In that same year, Marcia also dragged me to our first alternative medical conference in Manhattan. None of the approaches offered, even the orthomolecular psychiatry at the Atkins Center, relieved the clinical depression but it did start me on a journey with holistic medicine. Today, I practice my own brand of complementary medicine strictly for myself and for anyone else who wants to listen. Back in 1991, I didn’t know that when I returned to Stony Brook University in August of 2000, to once again take up my professorial duties after a five year long term disability leave of absence from Bipolar Disorder, that I would offer an eight hour course on nutritional medicine for the dental students. Much of what I have gleaned, I put into this course on nutrition. I discuss a bit of it here and if there is interest, I can offer more at a later date. Consider this therefore as Part 1.

Part 1

Sugar and Migraines

When I was twenty-seven and returned to Toronto from Israel with my Ph.D. in Biophysics, my headaches that I had all my life turned into migraines that I thought I would now have all my life. The migraines were much worse and my pain took on a new dimension of intensity. I had learned to tolerate pain since age four but this pain was excruciating. Migraine headaches are vascular in nature where one first triggers the vasoconstriction or squeezing of blood vessels in the head and neck followed by the vasodilation or expansion of blood vessels. During the second vascular phase, the blood vessels expand way past where they originally started and the poor migraine sufferer feels the horrific throbbing of the migraine. I don’t know about giving birth but you can’t imagine what the pain is like unless you are a migraine sufferer yourself.

After years of living with this physical pain, I read a book by a South American doctor in the early eighties on the relationship of sugar to migraines. I can’t remember his name or the name of the book, but I do remember what the doctor wrote. He said that sugar triggered a migraine in certain individuals who were susceptible to the biochemical changes initiated by sugar. My science background allowed me to understand what the doctor was suggesting and I was looking for any explanation for my migraines as I was desperate. I had gone to the Headache Clinic at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York and no such explanation was offered. Basically, table sugar or sucrose gets broken down in the body and causes insulin to be secreted by the pancreas.

The insulin is needed to transport the glucose breakdown sugar of the sucrose into our cells for energy, for work in our muscles, and for making triglycerides in our fat cells. During this process, there is an exchange of certain ions like magnesium and calcium across cell membranes that cause changes in the bioelectric character of the cells. If too much sucrose is broken down to glucose, the pancreas will secrete an overabundance of insulin (more about this below). The insulin action can actually reduce the blood sugar levels to even lower levels than normally found in a person’s bloodstream. So much so that the body can cause the secretion of epinephrine (adrenalin) and norepinephrine (noradreanalin) to cause the breakdown of glycogen stored in our bodies to glucose to raise and rebalance our blood glucose levels. Blood glucose levels are actually our blood sugar levels but use of the word sugar is actually a misnomer because when we say sugar, we usually mean sugar or sucrose. In any event, the secretion of epinephrine and norepinephrine can be a problem in some migraine sufferers whose blood vessels are susceptible because these hormones or neurotransmitters, in addition to breaking down glycogen which is a string of glucose molecules, cause vasoconstriction of the skin blood vessels in the head and neck. The consequence is that the migraine will commence and becomes difficult to stop.

The South American doctor noted that shortly after taking sweets, the migraine began in individuals. Anywhere from forty-five to ninety minutes after the sweets would do it. I noted his findings in the early 1980s in my head but never attempted to carefully watch my foods. That is until the Atkins Center in 1991. I weighed 175 pounds at the beginning of my treatment at the Atkins Center. A couple of months later, I was 150 pounds. Miraculously, the migraines disappeared at the lower weight after I went on a carbohydrate restricted diet. When I gained the weight back, the migraines returned. Not a double blind study for a scientist, but it convinced me that there was some validity to the relationship of sucrose to migraines. I still haven’t seen any writings on this subject, but I suggest you try it to see if there is a relationship of sugar to your migraines. There may not be as migraines have other causes such as food allergies, but it may be worth a try.

As a corollary to this story, my migraines had an additional component. I have done regression therapy back to my mother’s womb and have eliminated the emotional component of my migraines. I no longer suffer from migraines, but if I don’t watch the sugar, I still get muscle pain. Thank God, the migraines have left. You can read about Primal Therapy and return to the womb and migraines in both of my books, Divinely Inspired and the Messiah Interviews. As for everything I write about in my opinions in this article, I would appreciate your feedback if you would like to email me at jerrypollock@bellsouth.net A lot of supermarket foods have sucrose or glucose in them, so I can help you with this. You are trying to keep all sugar containing products to a minimum. Let’s move on to a related topic.

Sugar and Why You Can Gain Weight

Low carbohydrate was the whole premise for the Atkins diet to lose weight and it does work if you restrict your diet according to his suggestions. There has been a lot of controversy over the Atkins diet that you can read about elsewhere. With Dr. Atkin’s death, the diet has lost some traction although there are quite a few successful imitations out there. Some argue that the diet is not a healthy one and it is a truism that there is risk with everything. I’m back to my 175 pound weight but I do watch the sugar. The truth is that only about twenty-five percent of us can adequately metabolize sugar and get it out of our bodies so that it doesn’t cause weight gain. The rest of us can be affected by Carbs. It’s also a fact that although total daily calories are important, you can reach a state when you are older when it’s not how much you eat but what you eat. You probably ask yourself why you are gaining weight when you are hardly eating, or so you believe.

I don’t want to get too technical or give you scientific explanations that I don’t myself have at my fingertips, but have you ever heard of insulin resistance. Holistic doctors talk about insulin resistance in relation to becoming pre-diabetic and eventually diabetic and the relationship to being overweight. But why are some skinnier people diabetic while some overweight people do not have the illness?

When sugar is broken down, we said above that through a complex biochemical process, the glucose gets transported into our cells. This happens not only for table sugar but also for a starch like a potato that gets broken down into glucose or any simple carbohydrate like too much popcorn at the movies. We need that glucose for all our cells to provide energy in the form of ATP when the glucose reacts with oxygen inside our cells. The brain needs lots of energy and requires about 20% of our blood glucose. In addition to energy, our muscles need the glucose to convert to lactic acid so that they can function for example in throwing a punch or in exercise. Finally, the glucose gets transported into our fat cells and initially forms triglycerides which can be broken down, with the components of the triglyceride being converted into other lipids inside our fat cells. It is all of these lipids that have formed that can put on weight, especially if we are storing more fat than we are burning. In the Atkins diet, the low carbohydrate high protein forces the body to burn fat and thus Atkins saw the weight loss in his patients.

Okay, so what’s the connection? Well before the diabetic stage, the body tires of pumping out insulin and transporting the glucose. Insulin resistance first happens for the energy in our cells and brain although we usually have enough to function. There is a slowing down of the rate of glucose transport (thus the amount of glucose removed from the bloodstream is also decreased) which can be increased through medications such as Metformin or a nutritional supplement such as alpha lipoic acid. Now the glucose has accelerated more into our muscles and fat cells than into our cells and brain. This can happen at 150 pounds or 275 pounds depending on the person and his or her biochemistry. Next the muscles slow down in the insulin transport of glucose, so the best option for the body turns out to be transporting the glucose into fat cells. The muscle cells in addition to our other body cells have become more insulin resistant. The last to become insulin resistant are the fat cells, so if we are susceptible, we will gain weight until our fat cells become insulin resistant. We may weigh 350 pounds but we may still not be that bad in terms of insulin resistance in the fat cell systems. We keep gaining weight because we haven’t reached insulin resistance with our fat cells. Or we can be that 150 pounds and already be insulin resistant everywhere. Once all three systems become significantly insulin resistant, the blood sugar (blood glucose) levels may rise to the point where we are considered pre-diabetic. The insulin from the pancreas responding to the glucose in the bloodstream can no longer do its job. When levels of glucose go even higher in the bloodstream, diabetes can occur irrespective of whether you are fat or skinny. There is however more of a correlation between diabetes and being overweight.

A Tip in Preventing Intestinal Yeast Infections

Sugar can have effects on cardiovascular health and even cancer. It also can be a problem if you acquire an intestinal yeast infection. I should warn you that traditional allopathic medical doctors don’t believe in intestinal yeast infections even though they do accept oral and vaginal yeast infections. As a scientist having experienced the effects of yeast, I am a believer. It’s a lot more difficult to get rid of something than to acquire something. Some people say that about their marriages. Yeast in your large intestine can wreak havoc on you in similar ways that heavy metal contamination with mercury can, or yeast can cause similar symptoms as a low thyroid or having the low blood sugar levels of hypoglycemia. A couple of the telling signs of yeast are bloating and brain fog, but stool cultures and blood tests are needed to confirm an intestinal yeast infection. Mine was confirmed in 1991 at the Atkins Center. Yeast are a “bitch” to eliminate and a doctor who knows what he is doing is required. Intermixed with all of this is yeast allergy and the possibility of what I call yeast psychiatry. You may suffer clinical depression from the yeast and your family doctor may tell you that you need a psychiatrist. The yeast love sugar so once again you may need to go on a restricted carbohydrate diet.

While you are killing off the yeast and building your immune system to attack the yeast from the inside of your body outwards, you need to replace your intestinal tract with what we call good bacteria. When the yeast take over, they replace all your good bacteria. Back in the early nineties, we compared a bunch of commercial products for their good bacteria. It turned out that many of the commercial products had no live bacteria or were contaminated. We never published this work but you do need a product with live bacteria like that found in some organic yogurts in order for the bacteria to attach and adhere to the intestinal wall. I still use one of these products today. It’s called Kyo-Dophilus. I assure you that I have no stock in the company. There are others and you can ask your Health Food Store to recommend a product.

My tip is for prevention of yeast. The use of broad spectrum antibiotics that kill a wide variety of bacteria (both gram positive and gram negative bacteria) can alter the bacterial flora (composition) in the intestinal tract making it easier for yeast to take hold. Every time you take a pill of your broad spectrum antibiotic, you need to follow that one and a half hours to two hours later with two Kyo-Doplilus capsules or similar product. You let the antibiotic first go through your digestive system and then follow a couple of hours later with the good bacteria. The antibiotic each time you take it is destroying good bacteria and you need to replace it with new good bacteria. The use of good bacteria seems also to help with vaginal yeast infections.

I am going to stop Part 1 here. For pearls of wisdom on topics like Coenzyme Q10, omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, vitamin C, etc. please see Part 2 when it comes out. For information about me, my books, Divinely Inspired and the Messiah Interviews, and our nonprofit organization, please visit our website and blog at  www.shechinahthirdtemple.org or  www.thirdtempleinfo.com Shechinah means Divine Presence. May the Shechinah be with you.

Jerry J. Pollock, Ph.D.

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Messianic Age and the Third Temple

Opinion offered by Jerry J. Pollock, Ph.D.

When and what is the Messianic Age? Thirteen Hebrew Prophets over hundreds of years of biblical history spoke about a glorious Messianic Age at the End of Days when a future Third Temple will exist on earth. According to the Prophets, the Messianic Age is not the age of the Messiah, but rather is the age of God. The Messiah, whether Jesus or a Jewish Messiah descended from King David, will play an important role being God’s King in the End Times. According to the New Testament, Jesus will be resurrected and return to be King of the World; while in the Hebrew Bible, a person now on this earth or one yet to be born will be the exclusive King of the Jews in the Land of Israel. The latter statement implies that all Jews, even from the United States, will be ingathered by God to the Holy Land which God promised to the Jewish Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In His infinite wisdom, God decided that the Jews shall be keepers of the Land. In 1948, the Land of Israel became an officially recognized country fulfilling God’s ancient promise of permanency to the Patriarchs. The Land shall be transformed into a second Garden of Eden and there shall be healing, abundance, shelter, and longevity. The latter will seem like immortality, lasting 1300 years for those who are currently living and who are blessed to enter this dawn of a new era. Moreover, the dead shall be resurrected to face their lot. Either to live in this eternal world in bliss or to face the abhorrence of a future life that comes with a guilty verdict by God concerning one’s moral choices in this life. The majority of people will live out their lives in this world and will be subject to the normal vicissitudes of the ups and downs of daily living. They will not enter the Messianic Age. Only those who are judged righteous or evil by the Creator will either enter the Messianic Age or be sentenced to hell, respectively. God has always been the scorekeeper of our moral actions.

What is the Significance of the Messianic Age? God’s plan for humankind moves along whether we choose to believe in it or not. Without the imperfection of this world, we would not truly appreciate a more perfect world of a Messianic Age. Without our imperfections, what would be the impetus to have faith for those who have chosen to believe in a Supreme Being. How would we know the difference between right and wrong if we didn’t make and correct our wrong choices? Wouldn’t our world be dull if God did not continually test us in our moral behavior? Isn’t that why He instilled doubt into our brains along with intelligence, inquisitiveness, imagination, thought and language. Speaking about jobs in our depressed global economy, God is the biggest Creator of jobs on this earth. With His gift of free will, the number of jobs of the world’s population are as numerous as the stars. Yet, why go to all this trouble to create a failsafe plan for a future blissful age when we are facing so many problems in today’s world? Why worry about a Messianic Age when we have so much to worry about just keeping ourselves afloat? Many of us are struggling in misery with seemingly insurmountable problems that stare us in the face without apparent solutions. And the argument then becomes, “Where is God in all this?” It is said that God can save you from the forces of nature but He doesn’t interfere with the free will of man’s actions against man. Well many of our present problems are circumstantial and only indirectly a consequence of man’s actions against man, so why isn’t the Creator helping us instead of just watching from the sidelines? My answer is that we humans, especially the ancient Jews, booted Him out of our earth when our ancestors let King Solomon’s First Temple be destroyed by the Babylonians some twenty-five hundred years ago. The tides of history are imprinted by our actions. When the universe was created 14 billion years ago, the earth 4.5 billion years ago and evolutionary Homo sapiens or modern humans some 100,000 years ago in Africa, God was not on the public scene and was the God of Heaven. With the Creation of Adam and Eve some 5,769 years ago, God takes the public stage and becomes the God of Heaven and Earth. With the fall of the First Temple because of the continuous and flagrant breaking of the Ten Commandments, in spite of the Hebrew prophets countless warnings forecasting doom, God becomes the God of Heaven again. It now becomes the responsibility of human beings to restore the Covenant between man and God. Despite God’s public absence, He has never given up His stewardship of the world. The Messianic Age is when God will once again be the God of Heaven and Earth, a time of everlasting peace and harmony. Each descent we face becomes part of an ascent if we have faith.

Who Will be Admitted to the Garden of Eden? Prior to entering the Messianic Age, either a remnant of all worldly souls, or strictly its Jewish souls, will undergo purification so that their inclination to do evil will be subdued or eliminated. The purifying agent shall be the “Hand” of God in the form of water whose origin lies under the Third Temple. In order to accomplish such a miraculous feat, God shall have to bring about an incredible advancement in human evolution whereby our brains will be programmed to do only good without bad. This will be the end of humans as we know them as the connection between lower brain and higher brain centers will never be the same. Alternatively, the free will to choose between good and evil shall still be present in our brains, but because we shall know God as the waters of the sea, we will no longer have the inclination to make morally wrong choices. Morally wrong not based upon human morality. Morally wrong based upon Divine morality.

How would you rate yourself if according to you, your moral actions fell into or were close to one of the following categorizations. Then think about how you would fare if God was the scorekeeper and He was judging you:

5% Good and 95% Bad

This is an easy one since a little more bad and we would have a demonic individual. By anyone’s standards, this person will not be admitted to the Messianic Age and if dead will be resurrected to be accountable for his evil actions to God.

95% Good and 5% Bad

This too is an easy one as a person this good (95% good) is considered a very righteous person by God. Of course, the person can be way off if he or she is judging himself or herself.

20% Good and 80% Bad

This too is a no-brainer. A person at 80% bad may not be evil but is not a very nice person.

60% Good and 40% Bad

This graph of 60% good and 40% bad may represent the general population who could be 40% good and 60% bad or 50 % each of good and bad. According to my not so humble opinion, this may not be enough to gain entrance to the Messianic Age. It’s all up to God and what He recognizes in you and your future potential for the Messianic Age. Maybe you were all bad but lately have moved toward being good and that will go in your favor.  It’s both the quality of the sin; some sins count more against you, and the quantity of the sin; the number of times you sin that God somehow keeps track of.

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Bipolar Disorder
A Personal Story

Like in Alcoholics Anonymous, I sometimes wanted to shout to the world, “I am a Bipolar.” Why? Because I was desperate for help when I first contracted Bipolar Disease, but help was not forthcoming. Oh yes, there were the electroshock treatments that in 1991 made me a blithering idiot or in 1995 temporarily lifted my agitated clinical depression for one whole week before submerging me again in drudgery. During this week of freedom, I was so elated that my misery had lifted that I stupidly gave up my long term disability and returned to my professorial duties at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York. When the misery returned, all of a sudden I was gone from the university for a period that lasted five years. I had to reapply and get reapproved for my long term disability. The paperwork should have taken me at most a couple of hours. Instead like my original application, it took me three weeks. That’s how hard it was for me to do anything. It would be three years later before the shame of this illness allowed me to once more face my university colleagues through attending my friend Bill’s retirement party.

From 1991 through 1995, I was hospitalized four to five times, each time for several weeks in three different hospitals. I hated it each time. I couldn’t wear my hairpiece and when that door locked me in the psychiatric ward, I knew I was trapped in a world I detested. Oftentimes, I would plan my escape in that I would bolt out the door with visitors after visiting hours, but I never found the courage to do so. Had I tried and failed, I envisioned being placed in a straightjacket like in the movies. I had sunk pretty low from being an intelligent scientist who now accepted his lot that this is the way his lost life would be from here on in. In March of 1995, I planned my suicide. I had spoken to a patient in one of my hospital visits who described her suicide attempt with an overdose of pills. She sighed when she told me that her experience was not a good one but I wasn’t listening. I had been a pill taker all my life, so I believed I finally had found a way out of a world that was telling me that there was no way out. Only through Divine Providence of God coming to my wife Marcia am I alive today.

I took drugs for the voices I heard in my head and for the psychosis that accompanied my mania. The side effects of the drugs were involuntary twitching of the lips, brain fog, and tremors to the point that I could not sign my name. The antidepressant drugs that I tried never worked and only months of the passage of time brought me out of my episodes of severe clinical depression. My only respite was the two hours of sleep that I got from sheer exhaustion each night. I’ve never figured out why sleep was able to provide that relief but in retrospect, the doctors should have heavily sedated me with the most powerful sleeping pills. After all, isn’t that what they do, administer drugs? The three different psychiatrists that I had during this time period never really talked to me, never got at what I was feeling. Their role was to provide their patients with pharmaceuticals regardless of drug side effects.

When all else failed, I resorted to suicide by swallowing 200 aspirin and codeine pills that my mother had brought me from Toronto. At the time, my wife Marcia and my youngest daughter Erin were shopping forty-five minutes away from our home. They had no idea about what I had planned. I opened the two bottles of pills and took one or two pills at first, followed by four then six then eight. I was a pro at taking pills and the two hundred pills disappeared into my stomach in just fifteen or twenty minutes. I went to lie down and finally after months of finding it impossible to find a place for myself, I felt at peace. It was too late to reverse the process and I was waiting to see that light that people who have survived near death experiences talk about. Oops, I realized that I hadn’t written a suicide note to Marcia and the family. Nor had I recorded the date for posterity. I was certain, however, that I was going to die.

Meanwhile a miraculous intervention was occurring at the diner 45 minutes away by car. Erin and Marcia had just ordered lunch when Marcia said to Erin, “We have to go. Something’s wrong with dad.” When they showed up back at the house and woke me up, I blurted out what I had done. Marcia immediately called 911 and the Nesconset Fire Department responded within minutes. I initially refused to be taken to the emergency room, but Marcia pleaded with them and me. The sadness and desperation on her face changed my mind and all of a sudden I was being lifted off our king-size bed onto a stretcher. With sirens blasting, I found myself in surreal state. There were no beds at the emergency room, only an uncomfortable short stretcher in an air conditioned room with glaring overhead fluorescent lights. I was freezing and had to pee. An unkind nurse provided a metal urinal and I missed and urine was all over the sheet covering the stretcher. The nurse was less than compassionate. I felt humiliated and embarrassed, and within minutes someone placed a catheter into my penis. The catheter was painful and never should have been inserted.

The worse was yet to come as doctors and nurses stood over me while they pumped my stomach. They kept inserting this stinking tube through my nose. I was wishing it was over and finally for what seemed like forever, it was over, as everyone left. After more time had elapsed, of which I have no account, I remember finally being transferred to a bed that actually accommodated my 6 foot 2 inch height. That was the last thing I remembered as I was in and out and mostly out sleeping for the next 48 to 72 hours. The caring doctor on duty had told Marcia that they didn’t know whether I was going to make it. I had fallen down a bottomless pit and finally hit bottom. I was embarrassed and ashamed but didn’t know how I would continue to face this agitated clinical depression. Days later, I made a second feeble try at suicide with sixteen pills, still considered an overdose, and had my stomach pumped again. Marcia was fed up and dumped me without a kiss goodbye on the steps of the admissions office of the South Oaks Psychiatric Hospital. I dreaded returning and felt that this was the end of the line and the end of my freedom. This is where I would remain for the end of my days. I had hallucinated and seen my hairdressers with orange and purple hair and seen evil in paintings and people. I had delusions of grandeur thinking I was the Messiah. In my 1991 episode, I played chess with Saddam Hussein as we strategized during the first Gulf War. Ironically, I didn’t play chess. I even called the White House to speak to Barbara Bush to give her my advice for ending the war. I had experienced psychosis at the height of my mania and I had crashed to severe depression to the ultimate bottom, suicide.

Several months later when I had recovered from my suicide attempt and agitated depression, I found myself at a mental illness support group. The meeting was attended by parents of children who had the illness and I qualified because in August of 1994 and June of 1995, my twin sons, Sean and Seth had their first bouts respectively of Bipolar Disorder. I always felt that I was destined to have the illness at age 50 so I could understand what they were and are still going through. I was the first to have Bipolar Disorder in the family. My father suffered from depression but never experienced mania. My psychiatrist felt that the mania probably came from my mother who he suggested was hypomanic. Identical twin studies have shown that Bipolar Disorder, or Manic Depression as the illness used to be called, is genetic in about half the cases. That means that half the time only one identical twin has the illness. Where both twins are sick, you sometimes see one with Bipolar Disorder and the second with Schizoaffective Disorder or Schizophrenia. The “schizo” attachment signifies an additional thought disorder that can accompany the same mania and psychosis as seen in Bipolar Disorder. Bipolar as its name implies is different than the “schizo” disorders in that it is a mood disorder with swings from the high of mania to the low of depression. All types of mental illness are chemical imbalances in the brain and are not the fault of the unfortunate and often surprised recipient who is diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder.

No one knows the cause of Bipolar Disorder and after doing regressive therapy back to my mothers womb, I am not at all convinced that a genetic explanation in families such as mine is the cause for transmission to descendants like my sons. There is so much bioelectric activity occurring in the womb, especially in the birth canal prior to birth, that may change the neurotransmitters’ and hormones’ amounts and actions to set the stage later for the onset of the disease. Often the disease is not diagnosed for years because it seems that inability to do homework or focus in school can be explained by other problems such as attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactive disorder. The textbooks talk about Bipolar Disorder being diagnosed in children as early as age 8 but my wife Marcia was a special education disorder and she noted the mood swings of the mania and depression of Bipolar Disorder or Manic Depression in some of her 4 year olds. Most individuals are diagnosed in their teens or twenties like my sons. There are a smaller group who come down with the disease at about age 40. Rarely does one see anyone like myself at age 50. A young doctor, a pediatrician, in his late forties once stopped by my office at the university just to meet me and know that there was someone else like him who had the illness at such an older age in life. He too was the first in his family and had to give up his medical practice. I hope that I gave him hope. I was out of the university for five years on a long term disability and had just returned to Stony Brook to once again take up my professorial duties when this fine young man stopped by.

It’s a shame that mental illness still has the stigma attached to it although with more celebrities talking about the diseases, we are seeing more awareness and understanding from the public. I often think that the mentally ill are part of a group forgotten by society. Young people in particular think that you can just will yourself back to health. You cannot. You won’t go into remission from a particular episode of Bipolar Disorder until the chemical imbalance is restored in your brain to some fashion we might call normalcy. After years of taking drugs, that state of normalcy may not be the same as your brain was before you ever acquired the disease. Bipolar Disorder is like a tree stump. It stumps your life. Some people never work again and those that do are hampered. Rare ones like myself are blessed to return to a higher level of occupation. The illness is often the cause of job loss, marital tension and divorce, and addiction to mind altering drugs and alcohol. All the Bipolars I met in the hospital for some reason that I cannot comprehend smoked. Traditional Bipolar is diagnosed by mania followed by depression, but the disease takes on different forms with specific medical terminology. The latter is important but what’s more important is to realize that Bipolar Disorder is different for everyone and each individual episode can be different with common patterns. My illness is different from my twin sons, Seth and Sean and theirs is different from each other. How would genetics explain their differences unless influenced also by environment?

There are a lot of misconceptions out there, but when people get past their fears and ignorance, they will sometimes ask me what is the difference between hypomania and mania. From my perspective, mania is a more extreme form of brain activity. In hypomania, you may still be able to reach the individual and get him help before he has a full blown episode. In mania, the person hears your voice but he or she is really not listening to you. You can’t reach a person in their manic state unless they finally calm down with the assistance of drugs of they somehow realize themselves, like I did, that it’s time to seek help or you will lose your mind. People also sheepishly ask me what my suicide attempt was like. Bloody awful and demeaning I answer. I remember at that support group the social worker asking for someone to begin. Immediately, a woman sitting beside me jumped at the chance and said something I had never heard before. “Bipolar Disorder is a terminal illness.” No psychiatrist had ever expressed these words and they seemed to be floating in the air as I tried to grasp onto them and internalize them in my brain. The woman, whose husband was sitting solemnly beside her, was somber as she spoke lovingly about her son who blew his brains out with a gun. Thank God I took pills or that could have been me. The woman told of her son’s countless cries for help that went unanswered. When the coordinator of the group asked me to speak next, I wanted this woman to understand that I understood, so I described my suicide attempt. This story has always struck a sad chord in me and makes me grateful that I am still here. It brings up such mixed emotions in me.

There is still much to understand about Bipolar Disorder and lest people think I am anti-drug, I am not. In the old days without mood stabilizers such as lithium and the neuroleptics (anti-psychotics), they threw you into the loony bin and you never came out. It’s still a crapshoot in the case of the antidepressants. However, if you find the right one you will kiss the earth and thank God every day. You can have clinical depression without Bipolar Disorder and it is similar. In my case, the depression was mixed with an unyielding agitation of the mania part of my illness. I was given nothing for the Akithisia as the doctors refer to it and I could sit still for just a few seconds. It was horrific and that’s when I decided to finally end it all. Thank God for God coming to Marcia. I would never have known that I would have ever come up had I not survived. I hope that my story gives hope to people who are struggling today that every descent is part of an ascent to follow.

During those five years of long term disability, I was blessed with spiritual experiences of an incredible nature that led me to write my spiritual memoir, Divinely Inspired: Spiritual Awakening of a Soul followed by my ‘not so fictional’ novel, Messiah Interviews: Belonging to God. You will find the Bipolar experiences written about in Divinely Inspired. The psychiatrists speak about 25 % or so of Bipolars going into remission. I have not had an episode in thirteen years. I would like to believe that it’s because I have strengthened myself spiritually for the last ten years. Usually a person who doesn’t get enough sleep will trip into mania. I survive on very little sleep. These days I work hard on getting the messages of my books out to the general public. I write for the Creator but I also write for the forgotten members of our society, the mentally ill. While I was still a Professor at Stony Brook, I ran an ad in the university paper and offered my help to anyone with Bipolar Disorder. I do so now, so please contact me if you need help. You can email me at either jerrypollock@bellsouth.net or thirdtemple@bellsouth.net Please also visit my website to learn more about me, my books, and my spiritual mission. You can enter my website and Blog through www.shechinahthirdtemple.org or www.thirdtempleinfo.com
Thank you for listening.

Jerry Pollock, Ph.D.

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Ten Commandments, Parents & Children

Some Thoughts by Jerry J. Pollock, Ph.D.

What We Tell Our Children

From my own experience of being raised in a dysfunctional family, the most critical time for nurturing a child happens in the womb and in the first three years of life. This is the time for parents to establish a foundation of love to meet their children’s needs. In the womb, a mental telepathic communication is occurring between mother and fetus, and the fetus senses and actually knows it is being loved. In a baby and toddler, the feeling of love comes from the gentleness of touch and through hugs and kisses. Love allows children to focus on their interaction with parents without being distracted by negative feelings of fear and anger, which can soon turn into anxiety, panic, and rage. With abundant love, children build a trust to believe what you tell them. If more than one child is born to a family, then each child needs their full cup of love like a watering hole offers sufficient drinking water for all animals to get their fill.

Children are most impressionable and will internalize what you say to them in the first few years of life. As children age and their brains continue to mature, what you say has less impact on them. They begin to weigh your words and all of a sudden what you tell them is not accepted as the gospel. At first, they have this wonderful purity of innocence and their mouths are filled with pearls of unexpected wisdom. By the teenage years or earlier for each succeeding generation, it may seem that communication between them and you has been aborted. However, the brain is a computer and has stored everything you have told your children, so that after they get past their teenage years, what you have told them early on often takes them down an already established path of values they will maintain for the rest of their lives. If you haven’t told them anything meaningful, then life becomes a crapshoot on how they will turn out. Children model parents and I don’t mean to imply that children will be exact replicas of their parents, nor should they be. Yet, what you tell them can be critical in how they will act in this world.

In the Bible, Job says, “Days speak and a multitude of years teach wisdom.” It takes a long time to gain wisdom and when I was a young father at thirty to Melanie, Seth and Sean, I knew ‘shoots from shinola’ or nothing about parenting. I became a parent when Seth and Sean were eight and Melanie was already eleven. Through a second marriage to Marcia, I became a father to Erin at seven and Kenny at twelve. Marcia on the other hand had that wisdom as a young mother. She always offered unconditional love and knew how to set limits and raise her children, so that at the appropriate time they could fly away to become adults. No one can predict or pigeon hole how children will turn out in terms of being materially successful or leading happy lives, but what you say early on in their lives and thereafter can make a difference in how they will make their moral decisions in life. My moral character had to be developed on my own late in life because my parents were never models for me. In fact, I saw all the wrong things in my mother’s and father’s immoral actions.

When my granddaughter Sarah was only two, I was already telling her stories from the Bible and applying the concepts of these wonderful tales to today. From what I told her, she has already developed a strong love of God and a good sense of morality. At age ten, she knows right from wrong and is aware when she makes the wrong choice. I wear a gold bracelet of the Ten Commandments and she’ll some time pull on the bracelet on my wrist because she knows that it will be hers one day. Sarah is fully aware that I now live my life spiritually. So does my grandson Ethan know about spirituality at age five. Ethan has found his original belief in God not through me, but rather through his parents and through attending preschool at the synagogue we attend in Boca Raton, Florida. 

The Ten Commandments

I am far from perfect and I make missteps all the time in following the Ten Commandments. However, I make many less wrong choices today because I use the Ten Commandments as my moral guide. To me these commandments represent the good needed to balance the bad and the evil on this earth. I see nothing religious in these moral statements unless you consider them religious because they were given by God. I do not, since I believe that God is not religious but spiritual. The Ten Commandments to me are the spiritual basis of Judaism that the rabbis incorporated into the Jewish religion. Moreover, they can be removed from the Jewish religion and still stand as a complete entity on their own. Indeed they were meant to be the moral guide for all peoples irrespective of faith or belief in a Supreme God. The latter statement would of course be challenged by hard core atheists.

The reason General Patton was so successful was because he led by example. He was right there on the front lines with his troops. The reason God is so well known today is because He was right there when the Ten Commandments were presented to the 600,000 plus Israelites in the Sinai Desert thirty-three-hundred years ago. Moses was the leader of the Jewish people but if it was only Moses back there with the Israelites, the Ten Commandments would probably not have the stature they have today. We do not understand the Essence of God and the Creator has always been shrouded in mystery. Even Jesus would not be recognized as the Holy person that he is, had Jesus not been coupled to God. Who would have taken Jesus to Heaven? God made all things on this earth Holy. Human beings have tainted this Holiness by corrupting themselves, each other and nature. I believe that if we did not have the Ten Commandments, we would long ago have faced our Armageddon. Despite the presence of God, the Israelites never could sustain adherence to the Ten Commandments and the Jews have paid the piper throughout history. These seemingly simple ten utterances are probably infinitely more difficult challenges than today’s most sophisticated technological problems, which are being solved at lightning speed. As King Solomon said. “There is not a righteous person on earth who has not sinned.”

Ten Commandments, Parents and Children

It’s a pity that many in society consider the Ten Commandments a religious doctrine when they are not. In my humble opinion, it forces the false argument of the separation of Church and State and results in lost opportunities to reinforce making the right moral choices in life. Without that reinforcement, children need to rely on their parents and their churches and synagogues. Public education is excluded. The situation is particularly troublesome in Jewish children because only thirty percent of Jewish adults believe in God and only about fifteen percent attend synagogues. Belief in God is not a prerequisite for morality, but without God, humans tend to follow their own moral code which may be selectively different depending upon individual interpretation and rationalization. In contrast, Divine morality in the form of the Ten Commandments offers the highest standards of goodness to strive for, even if we can never be perfect. God made us imperfect so we could move toward perfection. He never expected us to be perfect. He will take care of that in the Messianic Age.

I think the most important thing we can teach our children is to be true and sincere in their hearts. The Eighth Commandment says, “Do not steal.” Stealing not only implies goods and money but also doing the wrong things that hurt institutions and people. Being honest and having integrity means that your heart is true and just. Even if you slip up, which you invariably will in life, God sees the righteousness in your heart. If you steal from institutions by cheating in science like I did or by bad business practices  or being a politician on the take, you betray the trust that these institutions had in you. You have broken the Eighth Commandment.

My wife Marcia was a special education teacher for emotionally disturbed children when we lived on Long Island, New York. The parents of these children often broke the Ten Commandments by abusing their children physically and emotionally. Children came in with bruises and burns and acted out aggressively or became sheepish introverts. Sometimes the only love they had was in my wife’s classroom. In those times that they felt comfortable to trust my wife and tell her what their parents did to them, Marcia would always tell them, “Nobody has the right to hurt you.” The Ninth Commandment states, “Do not testify as a perjurious witness against your neighbor.” Besides its literal meaning, this commandment can also be interpreted as wrongly hurting someone. Abusive parents are breaking the Ninth Commandment. What kind of message does this send to the children? Often they in turn are abusive when they have their own children, as they try to impossibly recover their unfulfilled needs with their parents through their children whom they are abusing.

The Fifth Commandment says, “Honor your father and your mother, as God your Lord commanded you.” That’s a pretty tall order for an abused child. I know from experience. I have been through this in my life and it’s a struggle to have a true heart and honor your parents. I can honestly say I have honored my parents but I’m not without my scars. By letting the love in, I forgive them because they gave me life and I am a product of all my experiences, good and bad. However, I do not absolve them like Jesus did, for their choice to hurt me. By letting the love in, I have successfully eliminated most of my hurts, but the memory of the hurt remains.

Teaching your children to love God teaches them the concept of love for other people, for true love of God encompasses love of others. The child can be told he doesn’t have to love everybody but that everybody deserves his respect, until they disrespect him. The child learns to love beyond his family. As the child gets older and sees God as good, he or she also more easily discerns the good and bad in others and will try to separate good and bad for himself or herself. Nothing in life is absolute, but a child raised with God in his life has the potential to be a spiritual person and lead a meaningful life. People do lead spiritual lives without believing in God, as I have close generous friends who do very good things for those in need in this world. The difference I think between me and them is that as a believer and hopefully as righteous in my actions, I expect God’s assistance in the outcome of my endeavors. Being religious doesn’t mean that you will lead a morally correct life. If your religion, irrespective of your faith, is not part of your spirituality, then you are not righteous. Rather you are self-righteous. If you are a believer, there is a certain fear of losing God which makes you think twice and spurs you on to make the morally correct decisions in life.

I won’t speak about adultery or murder except to highlight that adultery can lead to separation and divorce. These are moral choices made by the adulterer that can affect children in numerous ways. The loss of one spouse from the home can have devastating effects on the child because every child needs a mommy and daddy. There may be reasons which force a person to look for love outside his own backyard, but the courageous parent should not take the easy way out through adultery. Find a way to get out of your bad marriage first, before seeking love elsewhere. Remember a child models himself after the actions and words of his parent.

The Tenth Commandment speaks about desire, or in our modern terminology, keeping up with the Jones. Money in itself is not bad if you use part of what you have for charitable purposes. If you hear the cry of the pauper, then God will hear you when you cry out to Him. If you chase money, you gain material possessions and comforts and there is a very good chance you will saddle yourself with arrogance. Arrogance is the opposite of humility. A humble person, rich or poor, appreciates his status in life. He has respect for every living creature on this earth and has no need for one-upmanship. He doesn’t jump to criticize before he places himself in the shoes of the person whose actions or words he is examining. A humble person acts righteously in the eyes of the Creator and stands up for justice. A humble person is a great model for his children.

In a perfect world, all would be perfect. Of course, we don’t live in a perfect world. We are imperfect creatures occupying space on the planet waiting for the Messiah to come. Children have a pure spirit, an innocence, that can no longer be found once one is out of the childhood years. Maybe that’s an inevitable consequence as the brain of the child becomes more of a thinking brain and less of a feeling brain. Maybe this is what God intended. What I find fascinating is that the child is not irreversibly lost. He is just waiting to be rediscovered. When my doctor uncle was in the hospital, my wife and I went into Manhattan to visit him one day before he died. He was sleeping when we came into the room and he woke up and greeted us by name and with a smile. His words you might conclude were not profound but I was astounded by them, “Tell my mother I treated Mayor Koch.” He then returned to sleep. The mayor was never my uncle’s patient. He became part man and part boy on his deathbed. There is a boy or girl in each of us waiting to be rejuvenated. I feel extremely fortunate that I recently have found that little boy within me. His blond curls and smiling face give me hope that I can be happy with this gift of life.

It’s up to parents to maintain that pure spirit within their children so they can become good adults in our society. This is often an impossible task as parents themselves are damaged. Spirituality doesn’t necessarily make you happy, but it does make you grateful. If you give that one quality to your children, you will have helped your child in an immeasurable way. Setting a proper moral example as a parent is essential because God leads people in the direction they wish to go. People who have reached the pinnacle of spirituality in their lifetimes usually are great leaders who not only inspire but also empower.

Tags: Children, Love, Parents, Ten Commandments

The Spiritual Ladder

Jerry J. Pollock, Ph.D.

A Practical Need for Spirituality

Some years ago when I was doing the research for my spiritual memoir, Divinely Inspired: Spiritual Awakening of a Soul, I came across quotes from biblical commentators that have made an indelible impression on me. Back in the 1990s when I had no spiritual resources and faced Bipolar Disorder at age 50, I swallowed two-hundred pills and came within a hairsbreadth of departing this earth. If not for a Divine miracle of God coming to my wife Marcia, I would not be here today. You can read about it in Divinely Inspired; that is, if you are so inclined. I summarize the quotes, “In the time of extreme crisis, a person becomes incapable of calm reasoned analysis. His greatest strength at such a moment is the instinct he has developed through all his years of living and striving. It is too late when the awful moment comes to make the preparations or develop the personality to cope with it. People who have failed to develop their spiritual resources before extreme crises strike will not have the resources to conquer it.” I had an agitated depression that was of such severity that I could not sit still for more than a few seconds. My only respite was the two hours of sleep that followed my sheer exhaustion each day.

In the world we live in today, there are a lot more extreme crises taking place because of the economy. People are losing their homes, jobs and marriages, stealing, and falling into clinical depression. The stress factor is enormous and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see increases in the rates of deadly diseases like cancer, which itself can be classified as an extreme crisis. Suicide may be just waiting in the wings. Another biblical sage offered the following quote, “In the modern world, we are intimidated by sounds and messages. Some we ignore, others we hear, a few we assimilate, but only a rare one in a lifetime changes us.” My hope is that this message helps you begin or continue your journey on the spiritual ladder. If you are an agnostic, there is hope for you. If you are a hard core atheist, I suggest that you read both of my titles, Divinely Inspired and the Messiah Interviews, and then temporarily abandon your intelligence for faith and belief in God. Of course, God gave us His gift of free will, so it’s your choice. Thank God, I have made mine.

What is Spirituality?

I’ll tell you what it is not. It’s not religion although I am proud to be Jewish and part of my religion. In biblical times, God used his prophets to convey messages to the forerunners of the Jews, the ancient Israelites who were in a constant struggle to not fall off of God’s spiritual ladder. As the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 29:13 said, “These people draw near with their mouth, they honor me with their lips but their heart is far from me.” You can spout all the piety you want about how good a person you are and how you pray to God multiple times a day. However, if your heart is not a pure flame of spirit that is honest and true, then you are not spiritual.

In my humble opinion, religion does not offer salvation. Spirituality does. Religion can be, if it is a part of our spirituality but not the other way around. 

There is so much grief in the world because of religion. We cannot solve the global crisis of spirituality and bring peace to the world, because everyone is operating with a different playbook. What we can do is take the less traveled road and allow the spirituality buried within each of us to emerge. We need to ignite our ‘pintele yid’ in Judaism or our ‘kernal’ in Buddhism. God has purposely hidden this spark in our Divine soul so that we can have the joy of discovering it on our own. If you have ever felt that you are leading a meaningless life and that you are not important, you won’t any longer if you ignite your flame. It will give you something that money can’t buy and you will have a lot more than wealthy people without spirituality. As the great Chabad Lubavitcher Rabbi, the Rebbe Schneerson wrote, “God did not make one useless thing in this world.” Also, you add to the world by being spiritual. Then you can be a truly good person. The Rebbe again, “All that add. They add to Him.”

Spirituality is therefore something inside of you that allows you to act with a humble heart and be a kindred spirit and beacon of hope for those within and outside your inner circle of family and friends. Spirituality is an appreciation and gratefulness for life and the gifts that God gave us in the world we live in. When you have it, you don’t have to flaunt it. It’s inner peace where you are defenseless, non-struggling, and tensionless like a river flowing and bouncing off the rocks in the water or like the deer that frolic hither and there. It’s a respect for every living creature and for nature. If you attain spirituality, then you become more precious than gold. Some who have a natural spirit like my wife Marcia are indeed fortunate. Others like myself have to constantly move toward spirituality brushing aside the thorns blocking my path.

When you have climbed high enough on the ladder, you realize that it’s easier to climb right back up when you fall off the ladder. Belief in God helps you on your journey because if God recognizes your efforts at righteousness, He is right there with you assisting you as you slide backwards. You taste of His wine and not only His fragrance and have a right to expect his aid if you call out to Him. However, you can attain these elevated heights even if you don’t believe in Him. The consequence may be that you will smell His fragrance but not be offered His wine. God is Omniscient, all knowing, and sees all.

When you are spiritual, you see people without spirituality differently and like the river pushing away from the rocks, if their arrows are aimed at you they are deflected. You also unexpectedly find yourself being with and enjoying people who also have discovered the golden elixir of spirituality. The old saying is true, “Birds of a feather flock together.” As the days, months, and years pass, you see yourself differently and you grow wiser. Job said it best, “Days speak and a multitude of years teach wisdom.” If you are a believer, you see God in the shadows and know that your destiny is in His hands. When things are good, you praise and honor God and when they are bad and you are crushed and beaten, you still sing to Him. 

How do I Begin?

There are a plethora of spiritualists out there with how to guides, so I’ll just give you the direction that I took for my climb. I have been at it about ten years ever since Divine miracles entered my life. I have been so very fortunate to receive His Splendor. I feel honored for God coming into my life. In the Torah, God tells Moses that He will offer His blessings to anyone He pleases even to a sinner that does not deserve it. I am and was that sinner.

1. Your first challenge is to abandon your intelligence if you have no faith. Once you make this leap, your intelligence can stand alongside your faith. Famous scientists like Einstein and Newton did it. I too am a scientist. However, because of Divine Providence (Divine miracles), I did not have to abandon my intelligence. I immediately became a believer. If you can’t do this, then just resign yourself to being an agnostic or atheist and do the best you can at being a humanist. My own feeling about agnostics, despite what they say, is that they are atheists with subliminal fear of God. They will cry out to God at times of extreme crisis. The hard core atheists are not able to do this because they cannot swallow their pride or are anti-God because it’s the only way to rationalize away their hidden sins.

1. At the beginning and even when you are half way up the spiritual ladder, you will have doubt. Make it easy on yourself. Don’t initially attempt to resolve your doubt in a church or synagogue. Instead, start to talk quietly aloud to God on solitary walks. There is ample evidence in the Bible that it’s okay to be respectful and at the same time challenge God. Do not expect answers in hearing His Voice, like I was fortunate to hear, but if you hear His Voice, consider this a rare blessing. Stay the course even if you see no change in your life. Ultimately, I believe you will and when it happens you need to recognize that it was a gift from your Creator. In the Bible, King Solomon says that God will return to you if you return to Him. If God sees some future potential in you to becoming spiritual, even if you are not right now, He will answer you.

1. If you don’t see any changes say after three months in what you are asking of God, then you need to begin to take steps improve your moral character. You need to ignite the spark of your soul’s pintele yid. It is close to being extinguished. You can begin to act righteously. God is at all times giving us moral tests and He is keeping a scorecard of our decisions. Those decisions will determine whether we are admitted into the Messianic Age at the End of Days, as I outlined in my spiritual novel, the Messiah Interviews. We all know the difference between right and wrong. It’s choosing right over wrong. Often, we cannot see past our feelings. We can’t help that because of our upbringing. Be conscious of the following improvements to get your climb up the spiritual ladder activated:

(i)                  If no one is hurting you, you have no right to hurt them.

(ii)        No one has the right to physically, emotionally or mentally

                abuse anyone else – your spouse, your children etc.

(iii)       Look up the Ten Commandments (see my books) and try

        to follow them as best as you can.

(iv)       Be charitable. If you do not help the pauper when he cries        out to you, God will not hear you when you cry out to Him.        Actions speak louder than words, so carry out some action     even if you don’t mean it. Gradually, you will feel good        about giving to someone. If you cannot afford giving         money, then offer kindness through your words.       

(v)         Try to be more God-centered instead of self-centered.      Look to the old adage. Light a fire to warm a room instead        of wearing a fur coat and warming only yourself. Do some    kind deeds. Show mercy and be compassionate.

(vi)       Be honest and sincere in your heart. God sees your intent.       He values truth in your heart more than anything else.          Don’t cheat or steal in business or in life.

(vii)     All God wants is to be recognized that He is the One and         only God. Honor Him by thanking Him and be grateful for        the gifts he has given us.

(viii)    Treat each other with respect. You don’t have to like  

        a person. You just have to be courteous unless that person      is abusing you. Then by all means say something that         provides him or her with a message to back off. Obviously, this won’t work on a global scale where man’s treatment of     man is abhorrent.

(ix)       Be grateful for what you have. We often look somewhere else while we have it right in our own backyard.

(x)         Pray in silence when so inclined. Continue to pray aloud. God hears you either way but there is something cleansing    about expressing aloud.

Benefits of Spirituality

All of the above seem simplistic, and they are. They worked for me. Honestly, I feel that the rest that you do like going to a church or temple and praying is the tinsel. Practicing the religion when you are spiritual is a good thing. What deters us is what Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth a long time ago, “The attempt but not the deed confounds us.”

When I was about 80% up the spiritual ladder, which is where I like to think I am today, I believed that there are no coincidences. Everything happens to me for a reason and God determines my non-moral outcomes, when I act righteously in my moral decisions. For example, in the Bible, Jacob prepares for his meeting with his enraged brother Esau. Yet He knows that the outcome of his rendezvous is dependent on God. Jacob never took his righteousness for granted and I and you won’t either when you feel that inner flame of spirituality. I know how hard it is get the messages of my books out in a sea of books and a bad economy. I also know that my success is dependent upon God. And I’m not measuring success by fame and fortune.

There is an old saying. God helps those who help themselves. In life, I do everything I can and then when I am absolutely stuck, I go to God and ask for His help. When I became spiritual, I was glad whatever way a situation turned out because that’s the way I now believe it’s supposed to be. I never appreciated nature, but now I love to walk in the nature preserves near our house in Florida. Being spiritual means I want to make decisions that God would approve of. It also means that I have an unshakable faith whereby I not only know that God can cure me of an illness but that He will cure me. The verb tense is very important. I have converted uncertainty to certainty in my faith, trust, and love of God.

They say that God can save you from the forces of nature, but He does not interfere with man’s actions against man. Yet, I have done womb regression therapy and God saved me from an abortion attempt. It’s funny that the higher your personal desire to ascend the spiritual ladder and the higher you climb, the more you stumble. Ironically, the more you stumble, the easier it is to get up again. God has the most demanding standards for you to gain a foothold on the highest rungs of the ladder. Only a few in our history have been able to reach such heights. The Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, King David, and Jesus found themselves at the top of the ladder. There were others in the non-monotheistic religions.

This simple path that I have outlined is not an easy one. You have to invest more than your deeds to become spiritual. You need time, energy, and endurance in a life that is most certainly challenged to its full capacity. Those who reach heavenward may sow in tears but they will reap in joy climbing the spiritual ladder. My last suggestion is to take baby steps. Don’t be afraid. God will hold your hand.

Tags: Abraham, Buddhism, Chabad, Charitable, Divinely Inspired, Einstein, faith, God, Grateful, Intelligence, Isaac, Jacob, Jerry Pollock, Jesus, Judaism, Kernal, Kind Deeds, Kingdavid, Lubavitch, Messiah Interviews, Moses, Newton, Pintele Yid, Rebbe Schneerson, Spiritual Ladder, spirituality, Ten Commandments