The end of the world

Even if the world ends today, we still want to protect you.

Rumors of the death of the world have so far been exaggerated. Although these days, for the first time in history, we may actually have the power to make the planet go Krypton in the manner depicted above. If Stephen Hawking is wrong about some small detail in his theory of black holes – which very few humans alive understand except Hawking – then the Large Hadron Collider at CERN could actually cause just such an event, where a microscopic black hole sinks to the center of the planet and eats it from the inside. It would be a spectacular sight, but we wouldn’t be around to see it.

So far, however, there is no sign of the end. I consider this a good thing. Some angsty teens may disagree. And also, evidently, a few of my fellow Christians. Or at least one old preacher who doesn’t want to die, which I can certainly understand. I’m afraid he is mistaken, though, if he thinks the experience of the Rapture as depicted in Christian tradition will be significantly different from death. There would still be a transition. It is not like you get taken in a spaceship to another terrestrial planet. Probably. There are some who think this is what happened to Enoch and Elijah, especially since Enoch wrote a book with numerous astronomical references. Or so I have been told. But that does not seem to be what is happening here. Nor is the elderly preacher putting his baby son in a rocket and sending him to a planet circling a white sun.  If you’re going to the phantom zone, you may as well die and become a phantom that way, you know.

And that, my dear reader, is what I have been thinking on today, while taking a walk and listening to Angela’s beautiful song, The End of the World. This was the song that inspired me to write my groundbreaking series of gray entries in June 2005, starting with “The Next Big Thing”, in which I proposed that the end of human history was near: Not in the form of a physical disaster, but by a total conversion of the human mind to a new and higher level, resulting in the extinction of the current way of thinking in the same way as the Neanderthals and others like them just fell by the wayside after our minds achieved symbolic thinking that we have today.

Back then, those who could not keep up – not only the Neanderthals but most branches of humanity at the time – suddenly disappeared, and we descend from those few who invented symbolic thinking and those who were able to learn it.  (For instance, almost all humans descend from the “genetic Adam” who lived 60 000 – 90 000 years ago, but the Khoisan people do not. They parted way with our ancestors at least 110 000 years ago. Of all human groups that lived up to 65 000 years ago, only they and we survive, it seems.)

The Neanderthals had larger brains than we have. The various human tribes that existed around the time of the Dawn of the Mind were for all purposes identical, as far as we can guess from the fossil record and from the traces of crude stone axes made everywhere. And yet, with the sudden outbreak of the human mind as we know it, some were endowed with it and others were… left behind.

When I wrote all that stuff on 18-23 June 2005, it was pretty vague to me still. I am not sure if I had yet found One Cosmos, it certainly had not impressed me if so. I had read a little Ken Wilber, but I think that is pretty much it. I was not sure whether it was just me and a couple others in the world who were “getting it” even at a mostly theoretical level. It seemed impossible that the Transition would happen for generations yet. And indeed, most of the New Age seems to be spiritual fog and magic in modern clothes. But there really are some people here and there, often hidden among the ordinary religious masses, who are “downloading” the higher consciousness. We are on our way. Though we are not there today, and almost certainly not in 2012.

But when the Transition comes, I hope “we” (though I may no longer be there bodily) will be able to protect as many as possible in the chaos and turmoil that follows among those “left behind”. It is not like those who ascend sit up there and laugh at the maggots who fry down below. Those who look forward to such an ascent are likely to get a very unpleasant surprise, I suspect.

 

10 thoughts on “The end of the world

  1. Most people are not even awake when awake, so I think that is the natural place to start. I mean in the form of ordinary meditation, of course, but also the practice of self-reflection, of checking on oneself throughout the day to see what one is thinking, saying, doing.

    I like the parable of distracted people being in one of the six realms with their mind. This is a very good description. To be able to identify your states of mind while awake seems to me a necessary foundation for identifying your states while asleep, if you choose to specialize in that direction.

  2. I am, perhaps, simply in something of a low cycle right now, but it seems to me that not only are most of us not evolving, the greater part of society is DEVOLVING. I saw a truly funny post the other day speaking about the looming extinction of the “Grown-Up”, and although I was laughing about it, it was totally on-target. There are those individuals who are able to reach a higher level, and perhaps more and more of them are being born each generation, but it certainly doesn’t seem so. There are fewer and fewer actually aware of themselves, much less others or God or “society” or . . . anything more than the most shallow levels of self. If some of us have “teeth” and are fit to attack spiritual “meat”, it seems that most of us have only bare “gums” and are only fit to accept spiritual “pap”. The problem seems to be that even those who are only fit to accept pap DON’T, instead lolling around in their own mental and spiritual muck, wallowing in celebrities, sports, politics (and not even THOUGHTFUL politics, only muck-raking and mud-slinging), and such worldly things.

    It is not a good time for us, in so many ways.

    Hopefully, like I said, I’m just seeing this aspect right now and will soon be more evenly keeled. It is sad and frustrating, though, to be awaiting the next phase of human evolution, at least mentally, emotionally and/or spiritually, and see the masses traveling in herds, making up the vast majority of our societies and fouling the waters. Even growths that humans have already managed seem forgotten and/or shat upon.

  3. My question should have been this:
    What areas of spirituality are you planning to explore/specialize/learn about next?

  4. Kristi, I am not sure this will cheer you up, but I believe it was actually WORSE before. It is just that we mercifully forget over time, and so does civilization as a whole. I remember when I was a boy, listening to my grandfather – who was getting old at the time, I was the youngest of us kids – he felt the need to tell as much as he could from his own youth, the things he had seen, the things that had happened in the first two decades of the 20th century. It was a rough time indeed. They did not have all the crazy drugs that are common in the cities now, admittedly. But the widespread drunkenness, whoring and fighting was truly disheartening. And the hopelessness of those trapped in poverty we in the rich world cannot even imagine today. Not everyone bore that with dignity, let me tell you.

    I think there is more difference these days. The lows are lower, again largely thanks to drugs that make people even crazier than booze ever could. But the highs are higher too. People have more opportunity to unfold, for better or for worse.

    So what I hope is to give a helping hand to those who wish to move upward and forward and toward the Light, even if they may not be able to right yet. To tell them that there is an opening, that all is not lost even if they have failed and fallen and can’t seem to get up. Every second your mind is pointed toward Heaven counts, there are moments of eternity scattered in time and they will add up, they will never get lost. That is what I believe.

  5. Llama, I don’t really have any plans. What I have noticed is that the last couple years in particular I have taken to reading words of timeless wisdom by people greater than me. This may not be an acknowledged form of spiritual practice, except when you do it with holy scripture, but for me it is a matter of letting myself be touched by the light that is in these people (although they are usually long dead). I feel that I should increase my understanding of many different types of people, even people who don’t understand me and don’t want to. If I can meet them where they are rather than halfway, that is a good thing. Because I was immune to loneliness, I have lived a life that was largely separate from other people. I don’t want that to be the writing on my headstone: “He lived and died separate from other people.” I want to bring brightness and hope and courage to a few people for a short while, at least, before I leave this world. That is what I hope to achieve. It is not so much for myself anymore. I already am happy. I have enjoyed the later years of my life immensely. Now I want to share that, and I need the help of those who did so before me.

    I guess you can only do so much personal growth, depending on who you are, before you also need to do interpersonal growth. Which is to say, understanding other people and loving them. Then back to personal growth again, perhaps, and so back and forth?

    But people who don’t understand themselves much, or hardly at all, can’t aspire to understand other people either. So first I had to spend a long time on myself (being slow and all, I guess).

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