Sacha Stone – About Things That Matter

My Confusion & Fear of Walking on Water

Readings for 19th Sunday in ordinary time: I KINGS 19: 9A, 11-13A; PSALMS 85: 9-14; ROMANS 9: 1-5; MATTHEW 14: 22-23

In today’s Gospel, we hear Matthew’s iconic account of Yeshua walking on water – and of his invitation to Peter to follow the Master’s example.

The story is relevant to our times filled as they are with turbulence, polarization, and uncertainty. Those were the disturbing characteristics of Yeshua’s time as well – and of Matthew’s early church. In both contexts, there was turbulence everywhere. But despite it all, the early followers of Yeshua were asked to do the impossible – to walk on water themselves.

Before I get to what that might mean, here’s a reminder of how our own tempestuous times mirror those of Yeshua and Matthew.

My Own Confusion

If the truth be told, I must admit that I hardly know what to think anymore. The polarizing spirit of the day has me pretty upset. I can barely listen to the news each day. And the mere images of the politicians I have come to despise cause my stomach to churn. I can’t stand to hear their voices – or those of their ever-harsher critics. And besides that, I see no alternatives. (How much better is Joe Biden than Donald Trump?)

However, the immediate cause of my upset and confusion is the video I posted here last week – an interview by Jason Dean of Sacha Stone, the founder of the International Tribunal for Natural Justice. It generated a lot of controversy when it appeared on OpEdNews on Thursday.

Subsequently, a whole ZOOM meeting of the site’s editors, contributors, and readers had everyone arguing about the interview’s truth claims. Is the coronavirus a pandemic or a “plandemic?” Does wearing a facemask make sense? There was wide disagreement during the call.

Those questions and emotions generated by the video were rooted in the polarizing figure of Sacha Stone himself. He’s charismatic, articulate, extremely outspoken, and given, I fear, to hyperbole. On the one hand, he is deeply spiritual and reflective of the best of the mystical traditions shared by all the world’s great faiths. His passionate concern about and energetic action against the trafficking of children for pedophilic purposes is unmistakable and genuine.

On the other hand, he somewhat off-puttingly fills his discourse with references to evil, Satanic cults, the deep state, and to ruling class rituals devoted to drinking the blood of fear-adrenalized two and three-year-olds.

Obviously, then Stone himself is controversial. He illustrated, I said, the difficulty of classifying people today on the basis of the traditional categories of “left” and “right,” liberal and conservative.

For instance, he is a supporter of President Trump. But he has long despised, he says, all politicians as liars and sell-outs to the rich 1% that govern our nation through the lawmakers they have long since bought and sold. Nonetheless, Stone sees Trump as one of the two modern-era U.S. presidents of true human worth. The other one? John F. Kennedy.

In all of this, Stone finds prominent support in a former CIA operative, Robert David Steele. Steele was described by one OEN ZOOM call participant who knows Steele well, has corresponded with him, and has interviewed him formally as “a brilliant guy.” In fact, as an elite insider, Steele not only backs Stone’s claims about cults and blood, he serves as Commissioner and Chief Counsel on Stone’s International Tribunal for Natural Justice. Steele says 22,000 children are disappeared each day for purposes of pedophilia and employment in those blood rituals.

Is all of that disturbing and confusing enough for you? It’s almost more than I can bear. It has my head spinning with questions I thought resolved long ago about Trump, his portrayal in the media, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Even more seriously, it makes me wonder if our world is indeed controlled by sexual perverts who seem (in Stone’s words) “soulless” and as if they were aliens from another planet.

My only hope is that despite Steele’s endorsement, Stone’s claims about trafficked children are false or exaggerated. Failing that, my hope is that the truth of Stone’s accusations will all unmistakably come to light in the context of the explosive tip-of-the-iceberg saga of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Such revelation has world revolutionary potential.

Yeshua’s & Matthew’s Confusion

In the context of this Sunday homily, my thoughts about national and personal upset and about revolutionary solutions return me to the social and political circumstances of Yeshua’s own day and of the Gospel writer, Matthew some fifty years later. Both contexts were no less turbulent than our own. As a matter of fact, they were even more so.

Yeshua, of course, lived under Roman occupation. As a good Jew, he surely hated that. The four Gospels are filled with indications of his antipathy towards Rome. However, as a reformer of Judaism, the Master was even more upset about the collaboration between Rome and the Temple Establishment’s scribes and priests. In his estimation, they were even worse sell-outs than our own presidents, congresspeople, judges, media, police, and military.

I’m sure that Yeshua along with his inner circle and his poor and oppressed audiences hardly knew what to think.

The same was true for Matthew’s audience. More than fifty years after Yeshua’s death, tensions with Rome had exploded just as Yeshua had predicted they would. In the year 70, Rome had finally punished Jerusalem’s Jews for their insubordination. In fact, the genocidal Romans had attacked and brutally destroyed the Holy City of Jerusalem, killed more than a million of its inhabitants (including the entire leadership of the emergent Christian community) and razed its temple to the ground. Fifteen or 20 years later, when Matthew wrote his Gospel, his community was still reeling from that defining act of devastation.

It’s in that context that Matthew spins his iconic story of Yeshua walking on water.

The story goes that following Yeshua’s feeding of the 5000 (last week’s Gospel focus), Yeshua forces the apostles to get into their boat and row to the other side. [The text says, “Yeshua made (emphasis added) the disciples get into a boat and precede him to the other side.” Perhaps these experienced fishermen (as opposed to the land lubber, Yeshua) saw a storm was coming and were reluctant to set sail despite Yeshua’s urgings.] In any case, a storm does come up and the apostles fear they are all about to drown. You can imagine their cries for help.

Then they see a figure walking on the water in the midst of high threatening waves. At first, they think it’s a ghost. Then they realize that it’s Yeshua. He’s walking on the raging waters.

Peter, ever the impetuous leader of the apostles, doubts what he sees. So, he says “Prove to me that it’s you, Yeshua; let me walk on the waves just as you’re doing.” Yeshua says, “Join me then over here then.” So, Peter gets out of the boat and, like his teacher actually walks on water for a few steps.

Then, despite the evidence, he begins to doubt. And as he does so, he starts sinking below the water line. “Save me, Lord!” he cries out again. Yeshua stretches out his hand and saves Peter. Then he asks, “Where’s your faith? Why is it so weak? Why did you doubt?”

Of course, this whole story (like last week’s “Loaves and Fishes”) is one of the dramatic parables Matthew composed. If we get caught up in wondering whether we’re expected to believe that someone actually walked on water, we’ll miss the point of this powerful tale. It’s about Yeshua’s followers doing the unexpected and irrational in the midst of the seriously threatening crises life forces upon us.

You see, Matthew’s Jewish audience shared the belief du jour that the sea was inhabited by dangerous monsters – Leviathan being the most fearful. And courageously walking on water was a dramatic way of expressing what Matthew’s community believed about Jesus, viz. that he embodied the courage and power to do the completely unexpected in the midst of crisis and subdue the most threatening forces imaginable – even the most lethal they could think of, the Roman Empire.

Yeshua’s invitation to Peter communicates the truth that all of us have the power to confront monsters if we’ll just find the courage to leave safety concerns behind even in the most threatening conditions, to confront life’s monsters, and join Yeshua in the midst of its upheavals.

Problem is: we easily lose faith and courage. As a result, we’re overcome by life’s surging waves and by the monsters we imagine are lurking underneath.

Conclusion

So, what does it mean to confront today’s angry waters and invisible monsters. What are we to believe before those who tell us that everything’s fake, there is no truth, and that the world is run by leviathan beasts hiding below the waves boiling all around us? What are we to think for instance, when the police and military we were taught to trust, betray us utterly? What do we make of the fact that there are no leaders we can follow – when we fear that talking heads, pundits, and even the spiritually astute are only sowing confusion, spin, falsehood and doubt? What’s entailed in stretching out our hand towards our Great Teacher inviting us to walk on water and ignore the threatening confusion and fear engendered by our uncertain times dwarfed by those he himself and his followers endured?

Frankly, I’m not sure. As I said, I remain more confused than ever.

However, I do think that walking on water today means desperately grasping Yeshua’s hand in the sense of getting back to the basics of our Great Master’s message about the Kingdom of God. That’s the anchor for many of us. He told us that despite all appearances to the contrary – despite the engulfing waves:

We humans are not truly in charge. Life Itself is working things out in an evolutionary pattern that is beyond any of our thought categories (Matthew 6:25).
A New Era is in the process of birthing – a new heaven and a new earth is about to dawn (Matthew 3:2, 4:17; Mark 1:15).
In that order, empires of all kinds (including our own) are doomed (See the entire Book of Revelation).
The new heaven and earth are destined for everyone – not merely for the 1% (Luke 4: 14-22).
In fact, the present reality will be turned upside down. Those now considered “first” will be last (Matthew 20:16).
The dawning Kingdom will prioritize the needs of widows, orphans, immigrants, the poor and the oppressed.
It will be governed by a politics of love (not fear or hate).
There, the identity of those now despised (the poor, hungry, thirsty, houseless, naked and imprisoned) will be revealed as embodying Yeshua himself (Matthew 25: 40-45).

Embracing those truths promises to save us from being overwhelmed and drowned. No matter what the “informed” or “experts” might say, living by those convictions represents what it means to walk on water in these uncertain times.

Do the Terms “Left” & “Right” Still Have Meaning? The Case of Sacha Stone

At last week’s ZOOM meeting of OpEdNews contributors, editor-in-chief, Rob Kall, noted that some people have questioned the continued relevance of the terms “left” and “right” to designate positions on the political spectrum. Rob asked, have those categories outlived their usefulness?

Appearing to be in accord with Rob, one ZOOM contributor recalled that even Ralph Nader seemed to agree that the terms no longer serve. According to Nader, “left” and “right” classifications even impede concerted action for meaningful political reform by polarizing debaters and blinding them to the areas of agreement that they share.

All of that took on high relevance for me, when I came across Jason Dean’s YouTube interview of Sacha Stone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke-wWc_egmo

Stone is a Zimbabwean blogger, activist and founder of the NewEarth Project whose purpose is to “create a new way of conscious living.” His International Tribunal for Natural Justice focuses on human trafficking and child sex abuse. Stone is also a close colleague and collaborator with CIA whistleblower Robert David Steele.

In Dean’s hour-long, wide-ranging interview, Stone’s dynamic, articulate and intriguingly faith-centered statements exemplified a thinker one would be hard pressed to classify. I finished wondering whether he was left, right, conservative, liberal, radical, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Trumpian, apolitical, Christian, New Age, anti-Catholic, ecumenically religious, irreligious, or simply an anti-vaxxer and anti-mask provocateur (both of which he certainly was).

In any case, however, Stone came across as a potential ally and thought leader that someone like me (a progressive left-wing activist and spiritually based critic of the corporate establishment) could learn from and work with. And this despite Stone’s many initially questionable assertions including his description of Donald Trump as “absolutely perfect.”

So, I suggested that at the following week’s ZOOM meeting, we might discuss the Stone interview. Rob agreed. The interview’s highlights follow.

A Hippie or Libertarian?

Stone began with a description of the world’s ruling class as completely degenerate. And that included the leaders of national states, financiers, and religious establishments like the Catholic Church with its corrupt popes and hierarchy. (Stone was particularly hard on the Jesuits and the Catholic practice of sealing off women in convents and sending young, innocent boys to seminaries.) All of those institutions, along with their secret intelligence agencies (especially the CIA, Mossad, mi6, etc.) represent the world’s obscenely rich who comprise no more than 10% of its population.

Those positions seem “left,” don’t they? But there was more.

The hell of it is, Stone continued, that the policies of such miscreants prevent humans not only from meeting their physical needs. Their unquestionable dogmas and programs, rules and regulations also make it impossible for most of us to realize our human vocation as self-determinative creators of community, beauty, meaning and art.

And so, Big Pharma has us consuming poisons instead of respecting our bodies’ own natural healing processes. Big Ag leaves little alternative to ingesting similarly poisoned non-foods in place of our growing gardens and eating locally and only what is good for human health. Official state educational institutions indoctrinate all of us into thinking that what’s natural is harmful, while artificially produced products are preferable.

Doesn’t all of that sound like a back-to-nature hippie and home schooler? Or maybe Stone’s a libertarian.

The applicability of that latter category came through in his extremely strong positions on vaccines and facemasks during the present COVID-19 pandemic, as well as on taxes and on signing official certificates:

Never allow authorities to vaccinate you or your children with serums whose media of transmission are not only harmful but will enable our watchers to even more efficiently track our every move. (In fact, our keepers’ ultimate goal is to similarly mark for identification and tracking every single creature on earth – for purposes of profit and control.)
Never wear a face mask, he emphasized. Don’t purchase anything from any store requiring masking. Show your outrage and make sure shop owners know why.
Never sign anything without fully appreciating the meaning of your mark. It’s a sign that you approve of the transaction in question. So many of them are actually questionable at the very least.
Birth certificates are an abomination – a transfer of your offspring’s future into the hands of the state. And death certificates are only intended to establish actuarial tables for rapacious insurance companies.
Yes, pay sales taxes. But don’t fill out those 1040s. They are used for purposes no conscientious human being can approve.

So, that’s it maybe. Perhaps Sacha Stone is a libertarian. After all, he admits admiring Ron Paul.

A Trump Supporter?

But maybe not. . . Further statements made him sound like a white evangelical Republican. Get ready: this is where Stone’s designation of DJT as “absolutely perfect” comes in.

Echoing those evangelicals, Sacha Stone affirms that Donald Trump is God’s anointed. He’s doing God’s work, Stone says, through executive orders whose intention is to eliminate the human trafficking that is the focus of Stone’s activism and that he claims represents the very heart of the international economic system. No one knows about those executive orders, Stone said.

Neither has anyone else in government dared to question the foundation of U.S. policy since 9/11/2001. On that very day, Trump alone recognized what happened and immediately said so on camera. He said, “That was a controlled demolition, folks. I know; I’ve built skyscrapers.” In Stone’s words, Trump was the first living soul in America to make that call.

Moreover, Trump has done what no president had done before him – he has reached out in friendship to designated enemies like North Korea, Russia, and China. And you know what? For those heroic acts on behalf of world peace, Mr. Trump has been roundly vilified by the mainstream media, and by TV pundits from MSNBC to Fox, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal!

Trump is doing God’s work, Stone insists. He’s not only signing those executive orders that are saving children’s lives. He’s also laying the groundwork for the complete collapse of the entire system by embodying and thus exposing its unreality, deception and unviability.

And it’s working. All of our false idols: Hollywood, academia, the central banking cabal, along with every organ of government are crumbling before our eyes. That is by definition the grace of God. Good Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and other people of faith and no faith at all should be applauding Mr. Trump, rather than attacking him.

Stone’s Spiritual Grounding

Say what? Trump is God’s anointed? But doesn’t he embody government corruption, lies and deception? Isn’t he mistreating children at our southern border? Isn’t he himself money-driven, corrupt and an inveterate liar?

Despite his earlier statements, Stone seems to agree — in a backhanded sort of way.

It’s here that his self-confessed “inverted logic” and deep spirituality enter the picture – all within the context of COVID-19. Here’s Stone’s line of reasoning:

We are now living at the greatest moment of civilization.
In this unique context, COVID-19 is actually a Godsend – but not in the sense that it was authored by the Universal Mind that presides over everything that is.
Instead, the human soul is forged within that Mind’s dispensation of freedom that allows us to self-harm and then self-heal through our own action — to absolve and resurrect ourselves.
In this quadrant of the omniverse, there are no rules; only karma and dharma, the laws of cause and effect – what we sow, we reap.
In the midst of the pandemonium we ourselves have caused, each of us and the entire human community must forge our souls like nuggets of coal pressured into diamonds by our self-inflicted sorrow, pain and hurt which has made us both the poisoner and the poisoned. That’s what causes the Christed light suddenly to emerge.
At this moment of evolution – through our manufacture of pathogens, through the machinations of the pharmaceutical and agrochemical food system, we are experiencing an “orchestra of evil.” But we must remember that it is our orchestra; and we are the conductors.
Collectively and at the civilization level, we have reached a fulmination point – where it’s time to absolve all the poisoning at every level.
A small group of people consciously and intentionally standing in that flame can lift the entire human race. The spark we stubbornly hang on to will eviscerate the now-prevailing darkness. It is only a holographic projection that of itself has no soul – no Christed light.
The bottom line is that we all must practice right action and pure truth in our own lives.
We must live in the NOW, because that is all we have. It is always perfect – the point of perfection, absolution and forgiveness, transcendence, and transmutation. “It’s when you choose to forgive the trespass against you, to extend the hand of friendship, to build that bridge and be the mender of broken things in this world.”
All of us must live in that space.

It is Sacha Stone’s emphasis on the perfection of the NOW that provides the key for his judgment about Donald Trump’s own perfection. Since the NOW is all we have, and since it is always perfect calling us to absolution, forgiveness, transcendence, and transmutation, everything within that moment (including Mr. Trump) is calling us to create the world we all desire – a world of personal responsibility, beauty, art, and love.

Conclusion

So, what is Sacha Stone? Do the categories of “left” and “right” apply to him? And even though he supports Donald Trump, is an anti-vaxxer and rages against facemasks in the midst of a pandemic, can “progressives” dialog with a person like that?

Indeed, is Stone correct that in this extraordinary moment in our personal and collective histories, we are called to at least suspend our judgments, to recognize common ground, and join with brothers and sisters on the “right” to bring down our common deceivers and exploiters?

Join with us next Saturday from 8:00 to 9:30 on ZOOM to discuss it all. (Write to OEN editor-in-chief, Rob Kall at rob at opednews.com and put OEN ZOOM Meeting in the subject heading and he will provide the link.)