END TIMES

There has always been a temptation of human beings to believe that they live in the "end times," those minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years just before the reality we call existence will cease to be as we know it and a new physical reality will begin. 

In the 19th century, predictions often arose about a time and a place for that end.  Congregations of believers would gather then and there to either witness or participate in the new beginning.  In the 20th century, the notion of the "rapture" enticed more people with a vision of the heavenly assumption of the faithful (or the saved, depending on one's beliefs) and the earthly-now-turned-hellish left for those "left behind."

Central to such notions of end times was a reliance on a parochial belief system and some form of arcane validating scripture.  

Toward the end of the 20th century, the traditional religious systems and scriptures began to be replaced with pseudo-science and crypto-spirituality.  Using terminology born out of experimentation and verification and personal insights gathered out of personal experience and applying them prescriptively and universally, these new "end times" are supported by such concepts as time "worm holes,"  black holes, and convergence of spatial influences, and cast in idiosyncratic terms by self-selecting personalities who project their experiences as prophecy through the use of common "new age" language symbols.  

Common to both the older and the newer forms of "end time" thinking has been an appeal to people to consider that they live at a period of fulfillment, and a fulfillment which is not to be universal but particular.  Fulfillment is portrayed as an interruption of the flow of existence, not merely a paradigm shift.  This is not about change, but about conclusion. 

Underneath all of these projections of "end times" is a tremendous egoism: the assumption that some one theory or some one person has access to the meaning and secrets of the universe and that the biggest meaning and secret is that there is to be a loss of continuity of being.  There is also the egoism of the followers of such prohets of ultimate doom/hope, coupling their own specific participation in the revelation of meaning to the ultimate event of existence.  

Each of these "end times" models locate the source of ultimate change outside of ourselves in either a spiritual or a physical model.  People will be taken up by a rapture or swallowed up by a black hole.  Always so physical.  Have we missed something by thinking that the great shift of being will be physical and that it will happen to us?

What if we are each the agent of our own "end times," through which we spiritually find a transcendence beyond physical reality?  What if we are the creators rather than the victims? What if we leave the physical world not through cataclysmic end of meaning but by inclusion in a larger experience of meaning?

Are all the predictions and projections of "end times," either religious or scientific, just ways to avoid and evade our spiritual potential for change?

Down here one can stand at Mile Marker 0.  Standing there, one can decide they have reached the end of the road - an end which was predicted by Mile Marker 106 and Mile Marker 81 and Mile Marker 24 - and that now something will happen to one.  Or one can decide that they have glimpsed the beginning of the road, whose path ahead is unknown but will surely offer something different than what has already been.  At Mile Marker 0, one makes the choice of thinking they have reached an end and it is all about them or one makes the choice of thinking they have seen the beginning and they have the power to be a part of all that will be.  

And if someone standing beside MM0 tries to sell you an insurance policy of past learnings to save you from what is likely to occur or tries to sell you a map based on the physics or metaphysics of others showing what you will definitely find by choosing the path of your own exploration, keep your spiritual money in your pocket and say "No thank you!"  

The only "end times" which are coming will be when we "end" our own exploring, our own thinking, our own visioning, our own traveling.