THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
When we all reach spiritual awareness en masse, our routine level is transcended, the world is reborn, renewed, we join the dance, we all come Home. This is the goal or the End or end-purpose of the world, for which we have struggled so hard.
The Renewed World: pristine and original, again. All our humanity is crowned with Greater Love and happily gathered in.
The visions of the Renewed World can’t be predicted in theory. Rather, whenever we see afresh what is already before us, the world is made new, it’s startlingly familiar yet totally different. So at this moment, when we glimpse this renewal in meditation and the living of meditation in action, it shows us this in Principle: We evolve this world to love and receive Love, consciously embracing our Sacred Relationship in Oneness, a miracle of our recognition that divine Substance is evergiving Love.
Through this human play of opposites, duality is always pulling apart like cell division, yin and yang. Then in the unveiling we snap back together, uniting, dismissing all sense of separation and conflict in bliss, reclaiming these relations within the conscious Oneness of our divinity. So why fear this great day?
The beginning and end of the world are the same parables as the beginning and end of a life. Macrocosm, microcosm, the world is one. What we fear as apocalyptic disaster (like a graveyard) is really our spiritual elevation. What some of us see as disaster, others sense as rapture.
The apocalypse (Greek, unveiling) is at some point a frightening prospect for everyone. We conjure up such images as the four horsemen, or nuclear war. And at some time, since God is beyond forms, It looks like an annihilating flame. Yet we’re given chances to try out our reaction to seeming calamities: apocalypse training. In wintry Christmas and New Years, we unconsciously anticipate this turning. We each can and eventually will meet and overcome the dangers in our life, so we’ll all come to feel the unveiling as profound peace.
An accelerating pace of spiritual progress is leading us to the grand finale of the human scene. Why didn’t this happen in some past century? Because we don’t live this great unfoldment in some “past.” The past is the flowergirl throwing roses before the bride. We’re standing at this edge, consciously or not, we’re always and only living Now.
Dream: A crowd at a subway stop, chanting “5-4-3-2-1,” finishing a hopeful count-down to the end of the world, has a huge sheet dropped over them and they disappear; didn’t want to join that crowd, couldn’t identify with that literal idea.
The dream showed me how that type of end-of-the-world scenario doesn’t finish the trainride, and how the ego’s timing a finale. Let’s broaden our story. The world isn’t some evil swamp we break with. The entrance of everyone into expanded awareness is a flashpoint in a natural ripening process; happens in place, tied to everything; comes as a thief in the night; and even while some of us are scared of tumbling into a pit, it saves us all.
As one floret in the field enters the spiritual moment, the others around are corresponding instantly. Momentum builds in universal awareness, and individuals don’t run the show, we tune in and give traffic reports so we can all flow smoothly together.
Events might fall out one way or another during the course of history. We still need a certain critical mass, a deep visceral working-through of every needful doubt or half-formed realization, for us to move together to spiritual awareness. This could happen in an endless continuum of ways. Even time, space, and the senses can become entirely different (and indeed they may be so already, from one person to the next).
The Invisible One lounges quite comfortably in the empty fields of the future. It’s meant to be impossible for us to predict the character of the universe beforehand from a priori abstract principles. It’s supposed to be this way, so we can elaborate upon our eternal freedom, magnify and sanctify it, and invent choice even if the truths of our choosing are ineluctable, inevitable.
A vision: Our perceptible world swings suspended from the numinous luminous state by a universal joint like a mystic stem, so it flows and flowers and fruits in every direction, surprisingly. A fruit that drops in the exquisite moment of the fullness of time.
We all are saved. Only a shared Consciousness of the whole is ultimate Reality, for we all live one Life. I find renewal on the spiritual level, with no burden, no blame, no obligation, in rest and in return, in quietness and in confidence. I work on the self, surrendering to enlightenment. Everybody else is within what one person sees. Then when my awareness perfects, everyone must be blessed.
So who among us has fully ascended? Yet no failure if the Great Mission remains incomplete for us at the moment: the longest river thunders most mightily into the Ocean.
888
Principle: The Apocalyptic Future Is the Unveiled Now
We’re immortal, eternal, yet we can unknowingly be living this moment in a belief of compunction, routine, limit, and impending destruction. In the experience of nowness, we know wholeness forever. While we learn from short-term goals such as seeking companionship, a better career, prosperity or influence, our ultimate purpose is truly messianic; our universal transforming of awareness is all-encompassing, any path we espouse is a musical phrase only brought home when we’re playing the full symphony. Like little children, we can’t imagine the further level within our usual thought, but move towards unveiling in our play, meeting our own emerging shape.
Question: Does the Renewed World already exist? It’s a flourishing Tree. We can say it already Is entirely, self-complete in the very seed, as we find when centering. And we can say it’s perfected in timeless blueprint, in guiding Principle. And we can say this flexible programming develops extemporaneously, unique in each detail, as it grows from our own Consciousness. And we can say our course is set, due to our divine omniscience, our fruitful purpose in this human interim of Operation Bootstrap. Paradoxically, all is true.
We’re on an immense journey and always coming home. We tag home base again and again each day when we touch the spiritual plane of Consciousness (raising the score from 0 to 1), and when unconscious, we’re still surrounded by divinity. A paradox of divine No Thingness: the great opening, venting, ad-vent, adventure, directionality of history towards Revelation; and simultaneously the round, sitting-here, present completion which Is already. The circle that is simultaneously a spiral. The egg that looks fairly round and contains the round yolk, and is at the same time the pointed seed of Birth. A meditation: Relax and let what Is become. “I Always Am that I Am” and “I will be what I would be” are Your same ineffable Name.
Some things we don’t know or haven’t chosen constitute what we call “the future,” for answers to our questions come as we live them out.
The future and past aren’t literal, rather metaphors for an awareness we uncover in this instant. We could say instead that paradise lies across the sea, or in a past golden age. But “the future” is a greater image, it incorporates and integrates all things past and present.
So, like “heaven above”, “the spirit within,” or “the world outside,” completion in “the future” is one of the master metaphors.
“To know God aright is life eternal”: That is, within the meditative contact we find endlessness. Let’s recall, we don’t pray for the Renewed World, prayer is the Renewed World.
Off the mark to think about problems of “tomorrow” or “other places” as discounting this perfection---what does touch our thought we bless by seeing through to spiritual recognition.
The end of the world is Now, in the celestial moving resting place of Realization. The future and past are one, fulfilled Now. The Loving Principle: When, as the fruitage of prayer, we feel how everyone and everything in our view is heaven, the universe is heaven. Then we dance in time.
Unload me please and unveil,
Don’t leave me to die on my own.
My past curls up like a tail
Absorbed completely at noon.
The revelatory moment is the supreme and only Now, around which the rest of our life is clinging. So the nub of our question is satisfied by another great paradox: When we’re surrendered to God living Its life as us, the essence of past and future is gathered in the unveiled Now.
888
God appears here as the I, now as the Unveiling.
“The Emperor is far away,” the Chinese say. Human governance is a fond illusion, far removed. Change for the better: An ultimate subversive, Jesus saw The Storm as beautiful and awesome, what he calmed was his frightened students.
By Grace, we can shrug off any suggestion that it’s never happened, and let in the total Unveiling of the Presence presently. All past history of the universe, the earth and humankind is also but a vast projection of our own past life. Again, we’re always living Now, not in some past century. Haven’t we all been well prepared for the new phase?
Our apprehensive mind claims that we reach only individual and temporary exaltations. Being free, just what would we prefer? Beloved, we don’t need to keep staying at a hotel forever, when the miraculous Reality is holding open house.
888
The Principle of Forever Unfolding
Eternity is proliferating, ingenious, unendingly alive. Whatever is opening just exists within our one divine Consciousness, yet when We create the Other, we stand amazed at how the Infinite, which we encompass between two touching fingers, yet exceeds and envelops our beliefs, which can never fence and comprehend It.
Eternality is only just now, as God and the spiritual universe are just now, and the unassuming end of the world already Is. So eternality is in present ecstasy, not in an endless string of finiteness. As we all move into spiritual awareness, a more exciting and adventurous life begins. The culmination of our human world is no static heaven, but an invigorating metamorphosis as from pupae to butterflies.
We don’t predict or determine what’s emerging anyway. Some pieces that I intuit, from visions and miracles, at this limited point: Feeling ourselves all in the spiritual universe, we have a sense of discovering, not “deciding” about actions, we’re brought to continuously synchronize, going with the flow of our greater Self, surpassing the sense of separation, the paradoxic Middle Path of relations becoming in one Beingness. We commune, we love, every action fertile: sex, eating, breathing, conversing, inclusion, focusing, all are current metaphors for this at different levels. We’re known everywhere even as we know each other. With countless broadening streams always pulsing through us, at one point or another we may typify serenity or action, defenselessness or heroism, freshness or wisdom, compassion and love, with brushstrokes also sweeping us into living the whole life story of our cosmos. This new world is perceptible, with nature and our body around us more than ever; our metaphors are redeemed and transposed, kneaded in ways we can’t foresee. Different yet the same. (We see, any day, how the “same things” are done at entirely new depths, feeling God live Its life as us.)
After we migrate beyond the material experience, individuals continue to be “born” in an omnifruitful world.
The free falls of radical change that death provided, we now consciously dive into without nets. In and Out the Window, immortal Beings Realized transform, and vanish in the subtle sound and reappear; we’re recurrent patternings, we’re recaptured memories in the mind of God; and we go on producing descendants, like implications branching out the principles further, all of us living at once, with gold links looping between us in any direction through time.
Worldwide transcendence abolishes death, which can’t be done within the world except by the whole world. The world is God, it rebirths itself, it can’t be destroyed. Let’s call the bluff.
We cut the deck to evolve, personally and world wide. We’re all eternally here in the Consciousness of God, the only place anyone ever exists. We’re all transmuted, subsumed, within the unfolding flowering flowing freshet. If we relax in it and comfort us in its Presence, then every Single moment is complete, perfected, shalom, the “end of time.”