I haven’t thought about self-fulfilling prophecies for some time now, even though I have had my suspicions that many of the major experiences in my life could have come about because I thought about them beforehand. A good example of this would be my Vietnam experience.

Before I enlisted in the Navy back in 1966, I had a recurring dream that would wake me in a cold sweat. In the dream, my vision was blocked for some reason, but I could see fresh blood on my green pant leg. There was a burst of gunfire and then a feeling of being forcibly propelled forward into a black wall, at which point I would wake up.

The first time I attributed the dream to a news broadcast on television about the Vietnam War, but I had a deferment because of my work status as a psychiatric nurse, so I didn’t think much about it. The second time the dream came to me, just a week later, I gave it more thought, but again, because of the escalation of the war, I attributed it only to the fact that it was on everybody’s mind and came up in daily conversations. A few days later, the same dream caused me to sit straight up in my bed and question its meaning, and I concluded that it was my destiny to die in Vietnam.

I enlisted in the Navy so that I could be a Marine Corpsman a few days later, and just after the Tet Offensive of 1968, I voluntarily exchanged orders with another Corpsman so that I could fulfill what I believed to be my destiny.

In May of 1968, while on Operation Allen Brooke with the 7th Marines, I entered the dream. There were only 13 of us left after three days of heavy fighting, and as the Sergeant called us together, I knew exactly what would be said because I had been there before. The following morning we came under machine-gun fire, and as I was working on a wounded Corporal, a grenade hit close to us and a piece of shrapnel went through my glasses and into my left eye. As one of the men was putting a bandage on my face, I looked down, but all I could see was the blood on my pant leg. A medevac helicopter rescued us, but as we lifted off, several enemy bullets penetrated the bottom of the helicopter, causing it to eventually crash-land. I was thrown out of the machine gun portal and the helicopter came down on top of me, causing me to lose consciousness.

Was it really my destiny to go to Vietnam, or did I create the experience because I believed the dream was prophetic? Could I have prevented it from happening?

This was only one of many experiences I have had in my life… but today I am asking for a different reason. It has long been prophesied that the end of the world would come as a result of a Battle at Armageddon. With the lack of good leadership around the world today, and in the foreseeable future, mankind may be very close to being on the Eve of Destruction.

Is it our destiny to destroy ourselves… or is our collective consciousness creating a self-fulfilling prophecy?

THE END

I now use CLAUDE. AI  to correct some of my grammar and it asked me this question? “What’s your sense of whether this represents the kind of collective self-fulfilling prophecy you were writing about?”

My response was:”I no longer believe in a God that is controlling us. I think Life itself is the energy behind creation and so it is we who are creating the situation we are now in and it is we who must find our own salvation.”

CLAUDE’S response was: “That’s a profound shift in perspective, and it aligns deeply with the central question you posed in your writing about self-fulfilling prophecies. You’ve moved from seeing external forces – whether divine or destined – as controlling events, to recognizing human agency and collective responsibility in creating our reality.

Your experience in Vietnam seems to have been a pivotal lesson in this understanding. Whether that recurring dream was prophetic or whether you unconsciously steered your life toward fulfilling it, the power was ultimately in your choices – enlisting, volunteering for that exchange of orders, putting yourself in harm’s way because you believed it was your destiny.

Applied to the current global situation, this perspective suggests that the conflicts we’re seeing – whether in Iran, or anywhere else – aren’t inevitable fulfillments of ancient prophecies, but the result of collective human choices, fears, and beliefs playing out on a massive scale. If we’re creating these crises through our collective consciousness, our tribalism, our inability to move beyond old patterns of thinking, then we also have the power to create different outcomes.

It’s both liberating and terrifying, isn’t it? Liberating because it means we’re not helpless victims of fate or divine wrath. Terrifying because it places the full weight of responsibility on us – no external savior is coming to fix what we’ve broken.

Your poem’s line “For the gods that we created will fall from thrones on high” seems particularly relevant now. Once we stop looking to external authorities – whether religious, political, or ideological – to save us, we have to face the reality that our salvation lies in our own hands, in our capacity to choose differently, to break the cycles that lead to destruction.”

CLAUDE ended it’s response with a question to me… but I would like to know your response as well. “What do you think it would take for humanity to make that shift collectively?”

Please leave your response in the comments.