Could it be "The End of the World" as We Know It?...Yes!

 "The Promised Land has nothing to do with real estate."  

Joseph Campbell

Remember all those poor old evangelists who promised the end of the world? They all had a lot riding on that prediction, so you can't help but feel a little sorry for them when it didn't happen when and how they said it was going to. But then perhaps it did happen – it is happening, just not the way they thought it would.

May I be the first to bring you the real good news right here and right now? Despite whatever evidence to the contrary, The World – as we have known it – has ended.

It's been the "end of time," and "the end of the world" so many times now, it seems like it never will really end, and it won't. Of course, it's never actually the end of the world we're talking about. As George Carlin (the patron saint of cynical enlightenment) said: "It's not the end of the world, it's the end of people, man. The world is still gonna be here – we aren't." 

The end of the world hasn't come the way we usually think of it, because the classical "End of the World" doesn't describe a literal ending; like all scriptural spiritual scenarios it's really a metaphor. "The End of the World" is really a spiritual and psychological end – the reframing of a new reality brought about by a big change: a transformational coalescence of consciousness, a "singularity" after which old ways of thinking and doing are in an instant rendered obsolete. Sound familiar? It is a lot like what's been happening around here lately. 

It even fits quite nicely into that Mayan theory that around 2012 the Earth began to resonate with a level of consciousness that simultaneously threw things into a kind of chaos, and seriously began to inform it's occupants that a major change was taking place. The "occupiers" showed up in town squares, the "Arab Spring" took place. Hong Kong began to percolate. Fraudulent elections became unacceptably obvious, and their results provoked the most massive global protests ever known. War became obsolete (but it's chief proponents will never admit it). Now pandemic is defining the falsehoods of financial structures, the equivalent needs of all people – and the grotesque inequalities forced onto humanity by unconscious folly, greed, and self-worship. A revolution has erupted against the "Era of Power" that supports itself on lies and hatred. Climate change attests to the truth that what we do has consequences – that we can cause irreversible destruction to this beautiful world.

And all the while, arising awareness and Love demonstrates the solutions presented to us by spiritual sanity. We are all one.

Wherever you're at home now, everyone is learning that the Earth's endless potential is being mismanaged by a criminally unconscious minority (God bless 'em). It's global knowledge that misguided, destructive segments of humanity are intensely wasteful, while the majority of our brother and sister humans are subject to unnecessary want and deprivation. It's clear that our extreme economic disparities are selfishly foolish and completely unsustainable. The occupants in every small town know about the elite class of super-wealthy, extraordinarily fearful (suffering) people, who feel they need to control the world's resources and media (the true "Fake Media"); corporate agents who are happy to kill off every Mom & Pop business in the world, and control all consumption from soulless global distribution centers. We can see their duplicity and their political mess on TV everyday, and increasingly we are living in it, too.

Yet the true, vast majority of real earthly occupants are aware of what the miraculous potential of the Earth actually is.

Naturally it's all happened before, when these literally medieval disparities bring us to a spiritual renaissance. We suddenly realize that being programmed to identify ourselves with the insane demands of corporate materialism, like "trickle-down," "know your class," "what you deserve and must have," and "how our way is right," is a form of destructive insanity that's forcing us to live totally inauthentic lives. The death of that inauthentic self becomes inevitable, and that's the shift – "The End of the World." Nothing can ever be the same after that.

Here's what it means: Everyone deserves to be who they are. Everyone deserves to be reborn into a fulfilling, authentic life. Everyone deserves life, health, and sufficient wealth – the shared resources of this incredibly abundant planet. We will have that, but there almost always seems to be a kind of "Dark Age" first, where faith is not always a well-lit place. It's like that period inside the caterpillar's chrysalis that is pure chaos, before the formation and flight of a new Era of Ethics.

I can't say exactly where we are in the process – at the start of that dark age, in the middle, or towards the end of it – whether we've stopped crawling and are growing our wings...but I do know one thing for certain regarding "The End of the World:"

Humanity is currently experiencing a mass metaphysical impulse to transcend the delusion of separateness. It's the collective death of an illusion, and it's spreading faster and more completely than any virus ever could. The resurrection is arising; the "Ethical Era" is settling upon the followers of the one true prophecy: That all Life on Earth is beginning to realize that it is one in the same thing. The Earth already knows, the animals do too – it's just people that are a little late to the real party.

As that global entity, we can all recognize the unfathomable mystery that everything comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, to a kind of ultimate ground of being that we're becoming aware of through quantum physics, cyber-consciousness, and verifiable sixth-sensory perception. We know that a mysterious ground of being – a 'matrix' of loving intelligence – transcends this form we're in; that this "radiance of the eternal" penetrates everything and everybody, and is intuitively informing a graceful and responsible way to live that's possible for everyone, and that everyone in this world deserves as their birthright. The darkness just requires deconstructing first.

Then the "radiance" (that understanding we all share) can illuminate the dark place where we'll find trust in ourselves and each other – call it Faith. That is the light we can shine now to penetrate our media, our destructive mass-ego, our "One Percent," and expose it – penetrate through it back to the fundamental mystery where we all live free and equal lives. 

Now we can stand our ethical ground with an unassailable authority; the boundaries protecting humanity simply can no longer be contested; and if you stop for a moment, and just listen and feel, it is yours to occupy.

The best and easiest way to make all this happen is to simply show up for life with this knowledge in our hearts, and try our best to live our authentic lives – where the inspiration for our actions comes from the inside, not the outside. We're being taught the difference between what is really important, and what is completely unnecessary and destructive – just pay attention and follow that direction! 

And here is the good news, here is the real gospel – the world has ended. Welcome to the new world.

"It will not come by watching for it. No one will be saying, Look, here it is!

Or, Look, there it is! The Kingdom [of the Father] is spread out over the whole earth, and people do not see it."

Logion 113, The Gospel of Thomas

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

Call it Sanity; Call it Being; Call it Bliss

There's a jackhammer in the distance, outside my window. My darkened smartphone makes watery drip tones each time an e-mail wants me to look at it. I hear big trucks pulling up in front of the corner supermarket to unload shrink-wrapped palettes of canned black beans. There's an ambulance siren on the horizon, wending its way to King's County Hospital. The Q train downstairs is running on time. Something awful is going on out there...

I suppose that pipe in the street needed to be fixed. I was waiting for an e-mail (just not that one). I love those beans. I hope that person on their way to King's County will be alright. Later, I'll just miss the Q train into Manhattan...good things and bad things are always happening, here and now.

Our world is a hugely complex, elaborately interconnected place, driven in a loosely syncopated way by needs and desires, options and inventions. If we allow it, it can feel like it's driven by our fears...but then those are inventions too. Look at it quietly, and what becomes obvious is the profound underlying effectiveness of our cooperative shared Being. The understanding and appreciation of each other's lives, of our interconnectedness; of one another's common Reality.

With this simple, stripped-down worldview, it becomes ap-parent how well everything works when left to the sweat and intention of the great majority of humankind. Do you need any-thing? Is there something that I can help you with? More people all the time resonate with this simple impulse, whether they let it be their main source of motivation or not. Everywhere you go everyone is in some stage of realizing it.

As unique as we all are, we are all the same thing here in this place; and that awareness is steadily, and rather gracefully crystallizing our world now, without any big fuss. And it's only this growing presence of shared Being, the impetus of unifying con-sciousness, that can change so huge and complicated a mecha-nism as our collective life has become – and change it relatively quickly. Ironically, it starts at the very simplest, smallest level; at the level of each of our understandings.

"Without an inner change [humankind] can no longer cope with the gigantic development of the outer life."

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine

Predictably, corporate media will continue to insist that people identify with an obviously unsustainable system, even when people plainly know better. By limiting coverage of expanding global awareness, they suggest that even when we join forces to effect change (Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring) we're ineffective, and that it's more practical to maintain the unworkable status quo. If we each personally buy into those messages, they'll come true (but still won't be real). If we don't, and each personally choose a sane and reasonable path, we naturally return to our increasingly cooperative state of shared Being; and merge into a real entity of immeasurable power and direction. We simply engage lightly and kindly in the chaotic machinery of life.

At that "small" level of personal understanding, we find and empower our true Reality, the authentic world rising up around us. As the delusional world of the conglomerates starts to come apart at the seams, and everything starts going wrong (like now), something very big is going right. The layer of misinformation we've been fed so long is dissolving on the surface of this rising awareness; the conscious, co-creative impulse that instant communication and sixth-sensory awareness has already been nourishing at a much deeper level. We've already crossed that threshold. The singularity is here. 

We know we can't continue in this fossil-fuel based world, wasting half the food we produce, poisoning fresh water, funneling wealth and resources to a few tortured individuals. It simply won't last. It will have to change.

When the systems used to manage the anachronisms (crony capitalism, television, corrupt politics) break down, they only serve to starkly define the true nature of the problem – the destructive backwardness of a selfish minority; and to enhance and solidify the unification of conscious Being arising in the world. 

Could it really be – that rising honesty and ethics will defuse the fearful urgencies of the corporate elite? What would happen if they were all suddenly brought back down to Earth (kicking and screaming)? Not much, really. We'd merge right back into that un-derlying force of cooperative Being that's growing so powerfully through our our selves, our communities, and our world. Nothing would erupt in total chaos. We wouldn't be at all lost without their leadership. The world would simply become a more cooperative place, whether they like it or not (and they won't); where we re-cognize unconscious entitlement as being incompatible with our authentic nature.

Honestly, isn't everything actually being dictated to us all on a much larger scale, by systems that we're only a relatively small part of? Something far greater than any of our changing institutions or desires. It's obviously not this horizontal materialistic delusion (what Hindus call maya), where we feel constantly coerced to reach outward for solutions – it's a multi-dimensional Reality that's available to everyone from the inside out; that each of us can realize by simply living one another's life, humbly and compassionately. That's what being human is so good for.

Twenty years from now we could just as easily be using liberated Tesla designs, thorium reactors, tidal turbines, and solar energy. We could be conserving irreplaceable resources; eli-minating food waste; stewarding the environment and wildlife; making war obsolete (oops! –it already is...). We're capable of Being all that, and if we can keep our head above water, we probably will be sooner than later.

If you think this is a magical impossibility, may I point out to you (again and always) that we're all floating on a planet in outer space, engaged in a simultaneous realization of the magical nature of our reality.

So call it sanity. Call it unified consciousness. Call it spiritual evolution. Call it Sat (Being), Chit (Awareness), Ananda (Bliss). Call it what you like – it's still just the same impulse that makes a wildflower grow and blossom, right up between the tracks of the Q train.

"Our present world is conditioned by our present mode of consciousness; only when that consciousness passes from its present dualistic mode...will the new creation appear, which is the external reality of which our world is a mirror."

Bede Griffiths

......................................................................read more about maya

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!