Interview with Jerry Pollock
Today, Tyler R. Tichelaar of Reader Views is pleased to interview Jerry Pollock. Jerry previously joined me to talk about his fictional work “Messiah Interviews” but today he is here to talk about his personal story in “Divinely Inspired: Spiritual Awakening of a Soul.” Jerry Pollock is the author of seventy-five scientific publications. His background includes both a B.Sc. and M.Sc in Pharmacy from the University of Toronto, a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Postdoctoral training in Microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Pollock is currently Professor Emeritus in the Oral Biology and Pathology Department in the School of Dental Medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island. Jerry’s first writer of the arts book, “Divinely Inspired: Spiritual Awakening of a Soul,” was a spiritual memoir originally published in 2003. The second edition of “Divinely Inspired” will be reissued in Paperback on Jan. 1, 2009. His ‘not so fictional’ novel, “Messiah Interviews: Belonging to God,” due out also on Jan. 1, 2009, is Jerry’s way of giving back to the Creator. Historically, Jerry was born in Toronto. Jerry’s childhood, teenage, and young adult years were emotionally ravaged in an unloving, non-nurturing environment. Despite an unyielding anxiety and a neurotic repression of feelings, he succeeded in academics. The beginnings of Jerry’s interest in scientific research and a Canadian scholarship to study abroad caused him to leave Toronto in 1966 for Israel. Jerry completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1969 at the Weizmann Institute of Science. After finishing his doctorate, he left Toronto for the United States. He wound up as a Postdoctoral Fellow and subsequently as an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine. In 1973, he moved to Long Island to join the faculty of the Oral Biology & Pathology Department of the School of Dental Medicine at Stony Brook University. In 1982, Jerry was promoted to full professor, and in 1983 Jerry married Marcia. In 1990, he became an American citizen, but the following year Jerry suffered his first bout of Bipolar Disorder at age 50. In 1995, the Manic Depression forced him to take a five year long term disability from Stony Brook, but he returned in August of 2000 once again to take up his professorial duties. In July 2006, Jerry retired and became Professor Emeritus. As stated, Jerry has published seventy-five articles in peer reviewed scientific journals and books, and at one time held seven U.S. Patents. Unusual miraculous events of Divine intervention, described in both “Divinely Inspired” and “Messiah Interviews,” have led Jerry to a spiritual awakening and freedom from Bipolar Disorder. Today, Jerry is seeking inner peace by living each day with spiritual meaning in the Image of his Creator. Jerry is married to Marcia, his “bashert” or destined one. They reside in Florida. Tyler: Welcome, Jerry. I enjoyed talking to you so much about “Messiah Interviews” and learning more about the Jewish concept of Messiah and how you played with that idea in your novel. So I’m anxious to learn more about you personally as expressed in “Divinely Inspired: Spiritual Awakening of a Soul.” Just so our readers are clear, how do you define this book—is it memoir, autobiography?
I loved when the Jedi in the Star Wars movies said, “May the Force be with you.” In all sincerity with a humble heart, I say to all those reading this interview, “May the Shechinah be with you.” If you are fortunate to experience the Shechinah in your lifetime, you will have experienced the essence of the Creator. I was so blessed to feel God’s presence as He came into my life and changed me for the eternity. I really can’t call “Divinely Inspired” a complete biography. I’m 67 now; however, sometimes you know, you just know, when there is something more around the corner for you. We’ll have to save my future endeavors Tyler for our next interview. In retrospect, if I didn’t write “Divinely Inspired” as an incomplete biography in 2003, I probably wouldn’t have written “Messiah Interviews” in 2008. So maybe, it was all meant to be and destiny is at work. When you try to act righteously and walk in God’s path, there are no coincidences. God determines the outcome of your non-moral choices when you choose right over wrong in the moral tests He challenges you with in your everyday life. The miracles I experienced were so powerful that I chose to put my experiences down as the written word in “Divinely Inspired.” A later miracle of God being with me in my mother’s womb and saving me from an abortion attempt on my life is written about in the “Messiah Interviews.” We never discussed the earlier biographical part of the “Messiah Interviews” last time, because the main focus of the novel was where Yoseph, the protagonist, was being interviewed by biblical figures to be the Messiah. Perhaps, we can include it here in our interview. I warn the reader. If you choose to regress to your unconscious, you may open a can of worms. I did it and I am not sorry, but the therapy I have practiced for years, Primal Therapy, is not for the feint at heart. Let’s begin Tyler. Tyler: Will you start by giving us a little about the timeframe of when your story begins? What was the world like into which you were born? What did it mean to be born a Jewish child at the time and in the place where you were born? Jerry: I was born to a mother who had my brother at 17 and me when she was 20. My older brother, Norm, was born out of wedlock and I was born through a Divine miracle, because my mother tried to abort me in the first trimester of her pregnancy. My twin in the womb was lost during the abortion. The year of my birth was 1941 and we lived with my maternal grandparents in downtown Toronto before we moved into a house around the corner. In those days, you had your whole family within walking distance. My mother worked in a candy factory and my father was a shipper at a factory that made men’s suits. My mother completed Grade 9 and my father Grade 10, but that was never important to me. I just wanted their love, but it was not to be mine. It took me my entire neurotic years, until very recently in fact, to realize that no matter what accolades I would achieve in my life, they would never make up for the love I so desperately wanted in the womb, as an infant, toddler and child, but never received. There is an old quote, “Never seek the wind in the field. It is useless to try and find what is gone.” You can never grab onto the wind. Nor can you replace lost love with academic achievements or being an author. When you are neurotic, everything you do is geared to capturing the love that you can never recapture because you never had it in the first place. What was it like in Toronto especially on Bellwoods Avenue where I grew up? What I remember most fondly was running and playing on the streets with my brother. We did everything on the streets, as I lived in fear of both parents inside my house. There were always arguments between my mother and my father and I survived by never expressing my feelings. My mother was 5 feet 2 inches and my father 6 foot and physically strong (he was an amateur boxer), but it was clear to me that I should throw my lot in with her because she was the stronger one. There were periods of weeks when my father was not in the house, and I later learned that he was in the hospital with nervous breakdowns as they called clinical depression in those days. Like father like son I guess, as the dye was cast for my episodes of Bipolar Disorder beginning at age 50. I suffered from severe headaches as a kid which turned into migraines after I returned from Israel with my Ph.D. at age 27. I learned to tolerate physical pain and became a pill taker at age four. My physical pain was accompanied by anxiety, panic and constant worry. I never felt a part of anything or anyone. I always felt ugly and inferior. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were Jewish. I’ve done some genealogy and found that they all came from the Ukraine from small towns in around Kiev. I’ve also submitted my oral epithelial cells for DNA analyses and some DNA evidence suggests that perhaps my grandparents were themselves related back in the Ukraine. My grandparents belonged to an Orthodox Synagogue where I had my Bar Mitzvah. I had a sense of my Judaism from them but nobody ever talked about God. It seemed as though we were more Christian than Jewish as there were only a couple of Jewish families in the neighborhood. On Christmas Eve we hung stockings but I don’t ever recall celebrating Chanukah. Strange, that’s the first time I clearly remember not celebrating Hanukkah. You bring out the best of me Tyler by your questions. My father died in 1988 and had divorced my mother in the early 1970s. My mother moved downtown from the suburbs and attended the Young Street Mission where she essentially became a Christian. We used to have discussions about God, Judaism and Christianity when she visited us on Long Island. I was kind of her conscience. Today, she has dementia and is living in a nursing home in Toronto. She is 88 plus and still going strong. I saw her recently. On the first day, she called me her grandson. On the second day I told her I was her son. Her answer was, “That’s even better.” On the third day, I was her husband. I have had more quality time in the nursing home with my mother than I ever had as a child. She was always out and about but just not with me even if my physical presence was there with her. It took me too many wasted years to understand that I had the need to be nurtured and loved. However, she had no such motherly need. To get back to your question Tyler. For the most part, my life being Jewish was okay except for several incidences of anti-Semitism. That’s when I was most acutely aware that I was Jewish. I’m convinced that people don’t know why they are anti-Semitic. They are simply raised this way. I have my own ideas about the origins of anti-Semitism, but I don’t know if this is the time or the place to discuss them. Some of this is discussed in “Divinely Inspired.” There is an interesting spinoff of God choosing the Israelites over the idol worshipping nations to receive His Torah on Mount Sinai thirty-three hundred years ago. It says in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, “You did I know among the nations. I will hold you accountable for your iniquities (sins).” Few Jews realize that we are responsible for the sins of all past, present, and future Jews. So, we do have our own Cross to bear. My father favored my brother and I never quite understood that because I succeeded in academics and became a Professor, whereas my brother never completed High School. Years later, I asked my brother why Dad didn’t show me his love. I was blown away by Norm’s response, “Dad only loves sports.” My brother won the all Toronto city championships in the one-hundred yard dash at age seven. I was four and a half at the time and was with my father watching the race. The race was over in seconds, and when the announcement came over the loudspeaker that the smallest kid, my brother, had won, my father turned to me and said, “What are you doing here?” My father lived through my brother. I had been trying to win that race over and over again in so many different ways to gain my father’s love and approval in just about all the years of my life. He expected me to give him love without him offering it to me. My father would get red as a beet when angry and he scared the hell out of me when he had his moments of rage. Tyler: In the book, you talk about having an emotionally damaging childhood. Will you tell us about that childhood? Jerry: I’ve already alluded to some of my childhood, but I will elaborate a little further. I could go on ad infinitum. My mother was a dynamo and completely self involved. She would take no prisoners. In fact when I was having some problems at the university, my mother’s advice to me was, “you have to crush them, Jerry.” Boy, that’s not in the book either. I would go so far to say she was narcissistic. She definitely would have been a great caveman and not woman as she fulfilled her needs first. My brother and I got the scraps. She was also hyperactive and couldn’t be home unless she was exhausted. My father on the other hand was a homebody who just wanted to rest. They were a complete mismatch who came together because of sexual attraction and at one point lived in the same house where the sex took place before they were married. When my mother was not home, I discovered that she was partying with other men without my father. She always used cheap perfume but you couldn’t get close to her anyway because you would smudge her lipstick. My mother was actually warmer than my father who never told me he loved me until a few years before he died. In terms of toughness, I would put my mother up against anyone. She was quick on her feet and quick with her mouth and she had no fear. I’ve personally seen her destroy people. She was the one responsible for my father’s nervous breakdowns and ironically she was the one who got him out of the hospital and brought him home. Just a few years ago when she still had her mental faculties, I asked her if she was sorry for anything. She thought for a moment and incredibly and sadly responded, a quiet but assertive “No.” I think that I might have been a little more courageous with expressing my feelings had the headaches not come at age four. Once the physical pain came, I became vulnerable and helpless and, worst of all, dependent upon my mother and to some extent my father. Age four is too young an age to suffer such physical pain, but suffer I did. Without being further longwinded as I have been, maybe I should just let the reader read my story in “Divinely Inspired” and continue if they so wish to read more in the “Messiah Interviews.” I do however want to say that the unwanted pregnancy set the stage for my childhood and my lifelong neurosis. There is so much anguish that the fetus feels when there is a disconnect of love between mother and itself in the womb. There is mental telepathy between mother and fetus and the fetus knows just what the mother is feeling except that the fetus cannot use words to express the sensations it is experiencing. This is compounded when an unsuccessful abortion takes place and is further magnified when the mother rejects the baby at birth. When the baby is not wanted, there is a destructive wake of a perfect storm in the child’s future life. It is a permanent prison sentence where you might as well be inside the prison walls because outside is never quite satisfying and inner peace will elude you as you struggle and fail in life. I don’t want to give readers a false impression that “Divinely Inspired” is simply about my bad experiences. It’s a part of the book because I wanted to speak to the forgotten parts of our society; the children growing up in dysfunctional families and/or those afflicted with Bipolar Disorder or other mental illness. “Divinely Inspired,” like “Messiah Interviews,” is a reaffirmation of God in our world even though He is no longer on the public stage of life as He once was during biblical times. God has not yielded His stewardship of the world and is leading us to our second Garden of Eden, the Messianic Age at the End of Days. I don’t hate my parents. I’m grateful to them and I have forgiven them. I don’t forgive them for hurting me because as my wife Marcia says, “No one has the right to hurt you.” Moreover, I do realize now that my parents had limitations and different needs than me. They chose not to improve their character. When you love yourself for who you are, you can, as my therapist Tracee says, “Forgive and let the love in.” I’m grateful for my parents and every experience of my life, as all of my past has brought me to where I am and who I am today as a spiritual human being. I’m imperfect like everyone else. I’ve committed my share of sins. I would hope that readers get past the earlier somber parts of the book, including the suicide chapter, to find hope spoken about in the later chapters dealing with the amazing Divine miracles I was blessed with. Whatever creative genius God has given me, I try to offer in the Epilogue of “Divinely Inspired,” where I bring forth original hypotheses on the Ten Commandments and on Creation and Evolution both being under God’s domain. I am particularly proud of the Epilogue. It’s a mix of spirituality and science. I was, am and always will be a scientist; yet, I have unshakable faith in God. Tyler: At that young age, did you feel you had spiritual faith, and if so, could you tell us how your faith developed at that time? Jerry: If you agree that chanting your Haftorah (part of my Bar Mitzvah) to yourself throughout life is spiritual, then I guess there was something that God noticed inside of me as a child and perhaps in the womb. He saw the future spiritual potential in me even though I would go on to prove I was badly flawed. My faith really came after my Divine experiences. In 1982 in my summer cottage, I was blessed to hear God’s Voice twice. Then at the end of 1998 and after, I had unusual experiences that cannot be explained by science. Science cannot explain miracles. Neither can miracles explain science. Humans achieve the possible. God accomplishes the impossible. I recently read the most beautiful description of freedom. When they asked Michelangelo how he created such beautiful sculptures, he responded, “I saw an angel trapped inside and I carved to set her free.” Both Primal Therapy and the Creator have set me free. Tyler: It wasn’t until you were in your forties that you say you began to get in touch with your emotions. What do you think was the major difference between who you were as a young man and who you are now? Jerry: Through Primal Therapy, I became a feeling person virtually but not completely eliminating my neurosis. With God’s guidance, because you do have His assistance if you begin your journey to climb His spiritual ladder, I continue not only as I term it to belong to Him but also I act in Holy ways. That’s what it means to be created in His image. Holiness implies following the Ten Commandments as best as you can. It means not hurting anyone. It means being charitable and tolerant to people who have less than you. It means acting with humility and having respect for every creature on the planet and doing kind deeds for others. Your gift of God-given intelligence or wealth doesn’t mean that you are better than anyone else. Holiness means being compassionate and showing mercy and kindness. It means honoring those who are no longer with us including the biblical figures of past generations. It means recognizing the Creator as the One God, which is all He is asking for and needs. God is not the puppeteer. He desires a covenant with humans to forge a better world until we enter the Messianic Age. I’m getting passionate here, Tyler. Tyler: I understand primal therapy is what turned out to be most successful for you in learning to handle the challenges your life had given you. Will you tell us about this therapy and why it was beneficial to you? Jerry: The originator of the theory is Dr. Arthur Janov, so whatever I have learned comes from my reading of His theories. Whatever I have experienced initially came from my therapist and then I was able to carry on by myself. It’s very important to have an experienced Primal Therapist to begin the therapy. The real changes come when you regress to the womb. Your ‘Primal Pain’ that drives you in so many neurotic ways can only be unleashed if you travel back in time and relive your memories. When you return to your childhood, babyhood, and the womb, you empty the pain out until you are left only with the memory of the pain and not the pain itself. Think of a genie being let out of an ancient bottle as the cork is pulled. In Primal Therapy, the genie doesn’t come out in one fell swoop. It comes out a little bit at a time. You keep removing layers of the onion or as I put it in the “Messiah Interviews,” you keep chipping away at the bark of the tree. At the core of Primal Therapy is the fear of not being wanted and the need to be wanted. However, as you regress to the unconscious memories and bring them to consciousness, you will uncover layers of anger, repressed rage, anxiety, panic, and frustration. All of these are layered over the sadness and downheartedness of the hurts which will lead you to all those unexpressed needs that a person not damaged in the womb or as an infant, toddler and child, expresses normally. Primal therapy allows you to become whole again and be a feeling person. It doesn’t mean that you will become a spiritual person. It’s like the alcoholic. When he’s dry, he may still have the same nasty personality. That’s why you need the two, Primal Therapy and God, to find the bliss of inner peace. I’ve been inching my way and am getting closer to inner peace but I’m not there yet. It’s better to struggle if you can reach this state. Everything that you earn in life is better than it being given to you; however, you need to reach a state where you are not struggling, are defenseless, and have no tension in your body before you can claim inner peace. Your brain can lie to you that you’ve reached this state, so be careful. Listen to your feelings and your body. There is so much to say about Primal Therapy that we cannot say it all here. I do write about Primal Therapy in both books and I think readers would find it interesting to read both “Divinely Inspired” and the “Messiah Interviews.” I would suggest reading the “Messiah Interviews” first and then going back to read the prequel, “Divinely Inspired.” The analogy would be the Star War movies. I don’t mind being contacted by email if I can help someone. I believe in the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind. Ghandi said it. “I shall only walk this way but once. Let me not defer any kindness or help that I can give to another human being.” And before Ghandi, there were the Jewish sages and Jesus. It’s not fair to leave readers hanging, so I’ll give you two examples in Primal Therapy. Janov writes that when friends and relatives fulfill our neurotic needs, we are happy. The moment they do not, we are unhappy and can even dislike those closest to us. In the womb buried in the unconscious is the feeling that we can’t get our mother to do what we needed. A disconnect comes in like the anesthesia at birth and we experience panic, frustration and anger, even rage. We need to go back to those exact moments and feel the exact energy to ultimately release these same emotions we feel in the present but don’t know their source. There were no words in the womb. Only sensations. Once we do, we shall look at our closest loved ones differently. Nobody wants to be ignored and we can now express ourselves in the appropriate way instead of feeling the frustration and anger. The second example is a personal one discussed in the “Messiah Interviews.” When I finally got out of the womb, a nurse brought me to my mother. Her words were, “Get that ugly baby away from me.” At birth, I had no words or language so how can this be? Well, I went back to the exact moments and exact energy of the memory and with my matured adult brain, I recovered these words that were stored in my brain for the past 66 years. Other people have had similar experiences even remembering words their mothers said while they were in the womb. Memories are intentionally repressed because, for example, as a fetus, the pain might be too great too bear. Your thalamus in your brain refuses to transfer signals and emotions from your lower brain to your higher brain centers. It’s only when you are an adult that you can relive these awful memories. By the way, that’s why natural childbirth is so great. You can avoid a lot of this damage. Tyler: Will you describe your spiritual life during this time? Did you go through periods of doubt and disbelief, or did your faith always hold strong? Jerry: Once I had Divine Providence enter my life, it was only a matter of time that my faith would be unshakable as it is today and has been for a couple of years. However, as I wrote in “Divinely Inspired,” acquiring spirituality may be a long and arduous process. For most of us, there are thorns along the way, so yes I did not have a smooth voyage in my pursuit of God. To be a spiritual person is not easy. In addition to everything else in life, you have to invest both your time and your deeds. Tyler: Jerry, as a scientist, most people don’t expect you to have religious faith but to believe in science. Will you tell us about your career as a scientist? What drew you to science, and did you feel there was conflict between religion and science? Jerry: Thinking back, I now believe that my choice for scientific research was part of God’s plan for me. Sometimes we don’t see that all we have done in our lives is actually a preparation for a mission that seemingly is unrelated to all the steps we have taken along the way. In my case, the science cannot be separated from my spirituality. They are an integral part of each other. Doing a Ph.D. is great preparation for thinking deeply, writing, and being creative. It’s the creativity that allows you to take a fresh look at conclusions that people have made about, for example, Creation, Evolution and God and come up with your own theories and hypotheses. The combination of science and spirituality is wonderful because you can go beyond your intelligence and offer unique concepts to humanity. For instance, I proposed in “Divinely Inspired,” that God is the master scientist responsible for both Evolution and Creation. I have said that all of this life is God’s scientific experiment for us to become more perfect beings. We need to travel the road of imperfection to reach the perfection of the coming Messianic Age. If we look traditionally at my choice to be a scientist, you might say I fell into it. I was in a General Science course at the University of Toronto when I decided in my second year that I would switch to Pharmacy school. I thought that I would be a medical doctor on three separate occasions; after my Bachelors Degree in Pharmacy, my Masters in Pharmacy, and after my Ph.D. while in the Microbiology Department as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York University School of Medicine. I was bitten by the research bug while in my fourth year Pharmacy when I took supplemental courses in addition to my pharmacy curriculum. Tyler: Our reviewer, Paige Lovitt, commented upon your trust in God. She quoted you in the book as saying, “When you totally trust in God, you do so because you feel confident enough that when you do it, God will be there to assist you.” I admire people who have such faith—I try to myself—can you explain to us how it is possible to trust in God? What would you say to those who struggle and have doubts? And how do you explain this trust in something we can’t see to someone of a scientific mindset or someone who is an outright atheist? Jerry: I have been at rock bottom. As I describe in “Divinely Inspired,” I took 200 pills to end my life. Divine Providence saved my life through my wife Marcia. Living in today’s difficult economic times makes it even more difficult to have faith, especially when life already was a struggle before the economy soured and people lost their homes and their jobs. If I’m any example, then one of the best things one can say to himself or herself is that the current descent is part of an ascent yet to come. This is easier if you are a spiritual person. I have twin sons with Bipolar Disorder and their lives were put on hold when illness struck them in their twenties. To me, it seems that life has passed them by. My salvation is that they are becoming more spiritual with the passage of time and they are finding peace. I pray that they will be cured, if not in this world then in the next, the Messianic Age. We may suffer in this world, but God always had a failsafe plan for humankind, the Messianic Age at the End of Days. Keeping this new world of hope in your mind when you are at wits end can give you some peace if you truly believe. The premise for the “Messiah Interviews” is a message of hope, not Armageddon. A biblical sage wrote, “In a time of 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 believe in this quote because I almost went under with suicide when I didn’t develop my spirituality. In biblical times, Joseph the eleventh son of the Patriarch Jacob practiced what my former boss Izzy referred to as Joseph Economics. For seven years of good times, Joseph, as Viceroy of Egypt, stored grain so that when the seven years of famine came there would be enough to feed the population. Society needs to be doing this today and so do individuals. There is another quote, “God helps those who help themselves.” One final quote. “Those who do not hear the cries of the pauper cannot expect God to hear them when they cry out.” Life is unpredictable. We don’t know what lies ahead and we need to prepare. The anthropologist curator of the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, Ian Tattersall, said that we cannot associate with concepts that are outside of our experience. In our modern world, God is not on the public stage as He once was in biblical times. We can’t see God and most of us will not have the experiences that I was fortunate to have. It’s ironic that with our God-given free will, we can choose not to believe in Him. In fact we can be atheists and choose to disbelieve in Him. This came from a biblical commentator and I love the quote. “God offers His fragrance to all, but His wine is reserved for those who are righteous and wish to be guided by Him.” To have faith, you initially have to abandon your human rational and logical mind. Once you do, your intelligence can then stand alongside your faith. Part of the wine you receive for improving your moral character by choosing right over wrong is that you can expect God’s assistance. You can even tell him that when you are taking a walk. It doesn’t have to be a religious setting although anytime in any setting is appropriate. Tyler, you just have to take leap of faith. If you don’t, then you’ll never know what could be. I quote King Solomon at the beginning of my books. “I love those who love Me. For those who search for Me shall find Me. For one who finds Me has found life.” My suggestion is just let go. Abandon your intelligence and talk to God. Talking to Him is putting your Trust in Him. Acquiring spirituality is a progression. First, you believe and you have Faith even with doubt. Then you begin to trust in Him through prayer or any form of communication. Life is not easy these days and it’s easy to say where is God? It’s a lot better to be singing God’s praises when everything is going well. However, as a biblical commentator pointed out, it’s a lot more difficult to sing when you are crushed and beaten. I once read that the test of true faith is not only believing that God can cure you of an illness but that He will cure you. The tense of the verb is very important. Most people say to themselves or to others that it’s a possibility, so let’s wait and see. But a person who has reached the next rung on the spiritual ladder has no doubts. I believe there will be a Messianic Age. I have no doubts at all. As for agnostics, I think of them as atheists with subliminal fear of not having God when they might really need Him in a crisis in their lives. As for atheists, you may never convince them to believe. The sages say that God leads people in the direction they wish to go. Free will is granted really to the disinterested party who chooses not to believe. The righteous person does not really need free will for his moral choices. He is going to make the right decision. There is a saying that “There are no atheists in foxholes,” but there are some pretty hard core atheists out there. What’s more important than your belief system is what’s in your heart. If you are an atheist who is a humanist, I believe you will have God’s fragrance. But it is those who believe in Him and have sincerity and truthfulness in their hearts that will taste His wine and receive His assistance. Religion doesn’t guarantee salvation at the End of Days unless that religion is part of your spirituality and your holiness. I’m all talked out, yet there is so much more to discuss. Tyler: Thank you for the interview today, Jerry. You may be talked out, but you’ve given us plenty to reflect on, and I’m sure many of our readers are going to want to hear more of what you have to say in your book, so before we go, will you tell us about your website and what additional information may be found there about “Divinely Inspired: Spiritual Awakening of a Soul”? Jerry: It’s such a pleasure talking with you Tyler. This is not flattery. You are a great interviewer. Your questions probe. I thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity and I’m grateful. Please enter my website by going to either www.shechinahthirdtemple.org or www.thirdtempleinfo.com. There you will find out information about the books and links to purchase the books. Please also visit my amateur Blog for further links and additional information about the books while you are on the website. You can reach the Blog directly through http://shechinahthirdtemple.org/messiahblogs. I make this offer from my heart. You can contact me by email either at jerrypollock@bellsouth.net or thirdtemple@bellsouth.net if you need help or advice. If someone truly cannot afford the books, please contact me and we shall work something out. May I wish all readers of this interview joy and happiness. Tyler: Thank you, Jerry. I wish you much joy and happiness as well, and I thank you for your honesty and your open-hearted spirit.
|
Social Media NetworkQuick Links
Sign up for email updates Services for Authors
Literary awards and contests
PreViews
Inside Scoop Live
Review the Book
Reader Views Kids
Book Marketing Connections
Authors Access Forum
Book giveaway
|
Along with our book reviews we offer affordable services to meet the needs of our authors in the growing book publishing industry. Our service packages are budget friendly, effective, and will assist the author in showcasing their book to the reading audience.
