Saturday, April 26, 2008

Postcards from the Edge of Apocalypse

Apocalypse is a cosmological nightmare which brings about the very situation it is trying to avoid, each moth flying into the candle flame of self destruction, while attempting to cast the others into the furnace, if they will not submit to the divine plan.

By reifying the conflict of final struggle, apocalypse pits the forces of dark and light in an irresolvable diabolical confrontation, from which mutually assured destruction is all but inevitable.

This is an ultimate tragedy, because it sacrifices the fertility of natural regeneration for a triage of the death of life.

It is easy enough to understand the religious impulse to apocalyptic awakening, because it inflates the religious experience into an explosive cosmic coup de grace, in which all the currents of history, right from the very source, come into a cataclysmic focus, the old order is cast away as a material husk, and ignorance is sublimated in the crucible of 'cleansing fire'.

But this is also the polluted toxic fire of hell and annihilation rather than the sweet aromas and rainbows in the valleys of reflowering paradise, when to be the fulfillment of the Fall it is the Tree of Life, hidden since the foundation of the world, that is its natural inheritor.

The failure of apocalypse to give an absolute assurance of reflowering Eden leads to a realization that this whole apocalyptic dilemma has been created by religion to put a flaming sword between us and paradise for the purposes of keeping us in religious bondage.

The founding Edenic myth and its dysphoric relationship between woman and man, man and god, and human destiny is thus tainted by the intentional perversion of human nature, and cannot be trusted.

The idea of coming into a tumultuous age of reckoning is nevertheless an honest account of our free-fall from a fruitful and generative gatherer-hunter existence in the wilderness, into urban societies, rising and falling, amid war and the rumors of war, precipitating tumult, and wholesale destruction of the living biosphere.

The concept of the unveiling, throwing the covers off reality, no longer through a glass darkly, is likewise a subterranean stream-of-consciousness account of our growing awareness and scientific knowledge of the subtlety and complexity of the natural universe, from the human genome to the paradoxical conscious existential condition.

Nevertheless the apocalypse is a tainted current on the collective consciousness, driven by delusory ideals of a God of creation, jealous by the dubious 'virtue' of his desire to be worshiped alone, driving all the currents of history towards a falling out between the virtual or actual slaves of God and the infidel who choose to think, act, or believe otherwise.

In this falling out, a triage results not only of every living thing but the oceans, stars and the sky, thrusting the delusion into a cosmic frame of narcissistic and self-absorbed dimensions, rather than a redemption of the living planet from the devastating impacts of human industry and exploitation on the planets future viability, both for us and our sibling species.

The utopian dimensions of apocalypse lead towards an ultimate end-game of bluff and counter-bluff using weapons of mass destruction as pawns in the game of brinkmanship, in the name of one religious path of the one true God, or another, aiming to trick the unbelievers into a state of subservience in the domination of the planet by the one God, each of these paths hunger for, with a gluttonous 'spiritual' greed and little care for the consequences, given God on our side.

Apocalypse could be the unveiling of the bride in matrimonial reunion, healing the falling out between woman and man and the rape of the planet by humankind, reflowering of the tree of life of the generations, but it won't be, unless we break out of the tender-trap constructed by religious delusion and learn to take personal responsibility for the fate of the natural world and for our own personal part in its redemption.

This is the destiny of the messiah, of the bodhisattva, and of the compassionate benefactress once they cast off the shackles of religious oppression for the untrammeled depths of personal experience.

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