Prophetic Religion and the Personal Guide

We are inheritors of a prophetic religion in the tradition of Abraham. Typically the significance of this is lost on the average Jew, Christian, or Muslim—meaning that they simply follow a prophet or a messenger by convention—because they were born into it. The true significance of prophetic tradition, however, is that the universe we inhabit is full of an Active Agency, which awakens us and becomes our personal guide through the cosmos back toward “home.” Prophecy, therefore, is not about some event in the future, but about an unfolding in the present moment within our own being when the Guide shows up and we begin, personally, our own journey home under the influence of the Guide.

It is at that moment (that “new year” as a beginning point), that the content of any specific prophetic message becomes the very teaching that the Messenger brings into our own personal consciousness. When we “obey” the Messenger, listening to that guidance from within, then we have begun the journey home. “ … this is also the moment when the spiritual energy latent in this imperative allows the (person) of the Messenger to be ‘embodied’ in the personal form of the guide or Angel, at the horizon of (our own) inner vision” (Henry Corbin).