The Apocalypse and Emotion

The end is always coming. The idea that time has an end, haunts our religion, science, politics, and pop-culture. The curious part of the Apocalypse is how little curiosity there is about the origin and cause of this idea that time has an end. That time is linear, that time has a beginning an end. Before moving to examining the origin and cause of the Apocalypse, we shall take a very brief survey of Apocalyptic thought today. In religion Ministers and Preachers are always tilling us that the end times are upon us. That we better get right with the Deity. Religion is of course the source of the idea of an Apocalypse in Western civilization.The idea of the Apocalypse is an intrinsic part of Christianity. This is why Western civilization has always been beset by Apocalyptic movements. The Roman Church following the lead of St. Augustine has tried to move the idea of an end till after death. the reason should be obvious in an agricultural society, society cannot afford people doing nothing except wasting for the end. The society would starve; fields need to be planted, and brought to harvest. Even with the opposition of the Roman Church there were still numerous Apocalyptic movements through the Medieval period. Almost every reform movement in the Roman Church started as an Apocalyptic movement. After the Reformation, the Roman Church's power declined and Apocalyptic movements have flourished ever since. Present day examples would include sinister movements such as Heaven's Gate, along with more benign movements , like the "Left Behind" books. Every few years we hear of some Minister predicting the end is here. Western civilization accepts linear time as a presupposition. From it original home in religion, Apocalyptic thinking has crossed over into other fields; it has become a presupposition of the Western psyche. One might think science would be immune from Apocalyptic thinking, but one would be wrong. In the last few years there has been a number of Apocalyptic movements in science. These would include: Alar, Global cooling,Nuclear winter, and Global warming. Admittedly the science behind these movements varies in quality, but there has been an element of alarm-ism all the above. Alarmism is of course a necessary element in Apocalyptic thought. Many Global warming advocates are upset and surprised that Eastern cultures (China and India) do not seem to treat Global warming with any urgency or alacrity, The reason they do not is simple, the Eastern cultures do not have the concept of linear time as a presupposition. In the East time is thought to be cyclical. Both the ideas of linear and cyclical time are developments of the mythic view of cyclical time; later in this essay we shall observe how the mythic and Eastern concept of cyclical time differ. Let us now turn to politics. It is in Marxism and its development in Progressivism that we observe Apocalyptic thinking in its purest form in politics. That capitalism shall experience a devastating crash, and then some sort of Utopia shall arise. Marxism is of course a religion, it started out as a Christian heresy, but should be regarded as a religion in its own right. Marxism must be taken of faith, and it is a prescription for alienation, thus a religion. Marxism also highlights another aspect of Apocalyptic thinking; that it is a mixture of hopes and fears. After a time of misery, there shall be a golden age or Utopia. This is of course right out of Christian doctrine of the second Coming. That after the the great tribulation, Christ shall come to rule on Earth. Apocalyptic thinking is of course very useful to politicians, since it plays on both our hopes and fears. The messianic idea is very much alive in the totalitarian left. Politicians are always promising some sort of Utopia, if only the people give them power. In pop-culture Apocalyptic thinking is so pervasive that it is hard to choose what to examine. Every new year brings new movies, books, and video games that feature the end of the world. This seems especially true of video games, almost all of them are about saving the world or the cosmos. There is not only fictions references to the Apocalypse in pop-culture; remember The Mayan Calendar scare. To understand how linear time came to dominate Western thinking, we must move back to the axial age, in particular the period know as intertestamental Judaism. Only when we go back to the period between the writing of the New and Old testaments can we understand how the mythic conception of time gave rise to the linear time of the West and the cyclical time of the East. To start our examination of time, we shall begin with some quotes from Plato and Houston Smith. Let us begin with Plato (from the "Timeaus"translated by B. Jowett): "Now when the creator had formed the soul according to his well he formed within her the corporeal universe, and brought the two together and united them center to center. The soul inter fused everywhere from the center to the circumference of heaven, of which also she is the external envelopment herself turning in herself, began a divine beginning of never-ceasing and rational life enduring throughout all time. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible and partakes of reason and harmony, and being made by the best of intellectual and everlasting nature, is the best of things created. And because she is composed of the same and of the different and of being three, and is divided and, united in due proportion and in her revolutions returns upon herself, the soul when touching anything which has being whether dispersed in parts or undivided is stirred through all her powers to declare the sameness or difference of that thing and some other, and what individuals are related, and by what affected, and what way, and how , and when, both inthe world of generation and in the world of immutable being." Plato again from the "Timaeus" in more simple language: "Wherefore he (the Creator) resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity, and this image we call time" We shall now move to the quotes by Houston Smith about how primal people view time:from "The Worlds Religions": "In contrast to the historical religions of the West, which are messianically forward looking. primal religions give the appearance of looking towards the past, That is not altogether wrong, and from the Western perspective, where time is linear there is no other way to put the matter, But primal time is not linear; a straight line that moves from the past, through the present, into the future. It is not even cyclical as the Asian religions tend to regard it turning in the way the world turns and seasons cycle. Primal time is atemporal; an eternity now. To speak of a temporal or timeless time is paradoxical, but the paradox can be relieved if we see that primal focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, "past" means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things. That source provides the present the present is of secondary importance." And Houston Smith again: "For religions man of archaic cultures Mircea Elaide writes " the world is renewed annually; in other words with each new year it receives its original sanctity that is possessed when it came from the creator's hands" We observe from the above quotes that a chronological time cycle is not what the mythological psyche understands by cyclical time. Plato seems in some ways closer, but this is misleading also. The West followed Plato, while the East made cyclical time into a time or chronological sequence. The axial age is when humans and gods ceased to interact. So the question became what happened to the gods? There are only two ways to keep the gods as existing and explain there absence. That they are in a different place or a different time. The West went for place; the East for time. To understand how mythological cultures understood time we must delve deeper into the evolution of the modern logical consciousness, and how it deffers from the mythological consciousness. This change happened as I said before in the axial age, and the idea of linear time was born in a part of this age know as intertestamental Judaism (The time between the writing of the Old and New Testaments). It was in the period known as intertestamental Judaism that the notion of linear time, and the Apocalypse were born. The famous "War Scroll" of the "Dead Sea Scrolls" is a good example of this new type of thinking. That there shall be a final battle between good and evil, and good shall win, ushering in a Utopian age or Paradise on Earth. The period we know as intertestamental Judaism is at the end of the so called axial age. The axial age was when the old gods (mythological gods) left the Earth, and stopped communicating with humans. So humans were faced with the question of where the gods went? The idea that the gods did not exist was not an option at this point in the evolution of human consciousness. So the eastern religions took the path that the time cycle had changed, and the gods would return when the cycle again changed. The western religions followed Plato and moved the gods into a different realm of being; a divinized mental realm. This of course are the two logical answers to the problem of the gods. If the gods are not here they they must be at a different location in time or space. We see in Plato that the material realm is a flawed reflection of the eternal realm. This is why Plato uses the planetary system as his example. The planetary system (the Great Wheel) eternally revolves, but humans are trapped in the material ream can only view a limited spectrum of the eternal, thus we have time. If humans could view the whole there would be no time, only the eternal immutable reality. An analogy should help us to understand, of a video game. The whole program of the game is present, but the player can only view a part of the game at a time. So let us move to the mythological concept of time and how it differs from the modern logical constructs, and what part the mythological gods played in this conception. In this way to gain a deeper understanding of linear time and the meaning of an end to time. We must understand that the mythological consciousness differs considerably from the modern top-down logical consciousness that we all know so well. Let us start with a quote from C.G. Jung (taken from the "Commentary of the Golden Flower"):"An individual who is guided more by the unconscious than by conscious choice therefore tends towards marked psychic conservatism. This is the reason why the primitive why the primitive does not change in the course of thousands of years, and also why he fears anything strange and unusual. It might easily lead to maladaptation, and to the greatest psychic dangers-to a kind of neurosis, in fact. A higher and wider consciousness resulting towards autonomy, and rebels against the old gods who are nothing other than mighty primordial images that hitherto have held consciousness in thrall" The above quote contains many hints and ideas we must explore if we are to understand the nature of the old (mythological) gods, and how they relate to time. In examining the old gods, we may also discover the origin of consciousness. Many in our age doubt the magic of religion, and the gods, but is there a magic to the old gods and religion? The magic of religion is that it binds people together in cultures; to take a group of individuals and to forge them into a culture. To understand the magic or binding power of religion we have some work to do, so let us begin. To begin with the unconscious (the emotions) operate under different rules. The emotions do not recognize the law of non-contradiction. This can be clearly seen by examining any ancient mythology; where we see conflicting myths laid side by side. The contradicting myths do not cause the mythological consciousness any problems. The other issue we must recognize is that entities are connected by physical, and emotional resemblances, not by function and origin as in the rational consciousness. As I have written elsewhere ("Prologue to Metaphysics") the old gods are an emotional-informational nexus. That that the gods contain information that is carried by strong emotions. In a preliterate society one cannot consult books or manuals when needing information. Instead one must invoke the feeling or emotion that carries the information. We know from everyday consciousness that emotions carry information, as well as information invoking emotions. When we feel an emotion it brings back all the other times and information is carried on the emotion, and that when reading about some one's experience that it often brings about an emotional response in the reader. The only way primal people can retain information is to bind the information to emotions; they do this through the use of ritual. It is of course, through shared ritual that the emotions (magic) of binding peoples into cultures happens. So when members of a primal culture want to access information they preform a ritual, or invoke a god. The gods contain the scenarios that made a primal culture function. To illustrate what is happening here let us use a modern example; when we misplace something we try to reenact what we did before misplacing the object, we use ritual to find the object. Let me now speculate how this could lead to a god. As our example let us use a god of the hunt; a very important aspect to tribal life. Imagine a tribe has a very successful hunt; so they try to duplicate the success by reenacting the same hunt each time. This scenario gets personalized into a god. So each time the tribe goes out on a hunt they try to reenact the successful hunt; thus you have the birth of ritual. Remember primal people have a very low level of abstraction and only the haziest idea of causality. So there is no abstracting out the actions that led to the success from those that were superfluous to the hunt. This is of course the first sublation; that scenarios were consciously lifted off. Then if they accidentally do something different and it leads to a successful hunt; the hunting god was pleased, if an unsuccessful hunt then the hunting god was displeased. This is of course the birth of critical thought and consciousness as we know it. The lifting off of scenarios to compare them is of course the hallmark of consciousness. This is why the birth of writing caused such a crisis in the mythological paradigm. It is illustrative to go to another quote from Plato (taken from the "Phaedrus" translated by R. Hackforth) the quote is a dialogue between an Egyptian King (Pharaoh) and the god Thoth about Thoth's invention of writing: "But when it came to writing Theuth said "Here O King, is a branch of learning that well make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom" But the King answered and said " O man full of arts, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this it will implant forgetfulness, in their souls; they well cease to exercise memory because they shall rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer within themselves, but by external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but its semblance, for by telling them many things without teaching them you will make them to seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled with wisdom, but with conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows" We should now be able to make some sense of the above puzzling quote. The Egyptian King says that writing is a recipe for reminder and not not memory. So what is it that is being forgotten? The short answer is the old gods.Preliterate cultures used ritual to invoke the emotions that information is carried on to remember information. In other words, to preform a cert in skill or scenario the god that controlled that skill or scenario had to be invoked. This is why Jung said that the old gods held consciousness in thrall. The modern rational consciousness access information by consulting information carried in writing, the primal or mythological consciousness accessed information by invoking the emotion that the information was carried on: the god. It should now be obvious how mythology led to the development of humans as conscious agents. Unlike other animals humans discovered a way to store or bind information. It is well known by zoologists that troops of chimpanzees often discover primitive technologies, but they often forget the techniques, because they can not store the information. Humans original way of binding information was mythology centering around the gods. The old gods were a information-emotional nexus. This is why art and every other faucet of life was based around a cultures mythology. The mythology stored the information and techniques that a society needs, and by invoking the gods the information was made accessible to humans. So the information-emotional nexus (the god) represented an eternal source, but had nothing to do with priority in time. An example should help illustrate. Venus is the goddess of love, and sexuality. Every generation encounters Venus for the first time at puberty; it is always new and original for that generation, but a constant for human nature. This is how the mythological consciousness viewed time, not as a linear process, but as an ingress of the eternal into the lives of people and nature. Since primal people did not have a law of non-contradiction there was no problem of the eternal and temporal sitting side by side. It was when the law of non-contradiction began to dominate consciousness during the rational revolution in the axial age that the eternal and temporal became a problem. The West following Plato banished the gods (the eternal) to a higher plane of being; The East banished the gods to a different place in time. This was the situation that led to the creation of linear time in intertestamental Judaism. We must return now to the question we started with: why an end of the world? The reason should be obvious, that the world of the old gods has ended. The old gods had been forgotten; it was a new age caused by a new way of thinking. A world had indeed ended. People were trying to make sense of the new world rational consciousness had created. Any one interested can easily examine the anxiety that this change had on the people of the time. Examples would be the writings of the Gnostics and the drama of the classical Greeks. The end of a world by changing consciousness may be the ultimate lesson we can learn from the Apocalypse. A lesson we would be wise to study; for our age is much like the that if intertestamental Judaism. The top-down paradigm is crashing down; the old religions are being forgotten. As Nietzsche taught us we are experiencing a transvalution of values; one world is ending and another beginning