PART II

FOUR MYTH-PERCEPTIONS OF THE APOCALYPSE

“When you find yourself on a vicious cycle, for goodness sakes, stop peddling!”

— Swami Beyondananda

 

 

 

We have seen how perceptions impact our biology and, in turn, help create our reality. We have also seen that our story—the philosophical lens of perception through which we see and understand the world—largely determines the parameters of our collective reality. Our review of history reveals that civilizations continuously evolve as one basal paradigm story gives way to another in a dynamic, spiral dance.

Civilization is, indeed, in a spiral dance, but we seem to be spiraling out of control. Global crises and mounting chaos signal an impending evolutionary turning point, a sign that we are close to the next paradigmatic hand-off. Now that we have fully experienced the polarity of scientific materialism, our path is rapidly approaching its return to the powerful midpoint—the most powerful point in the chart.

Twice before, we have been at the midpoint where the spiritual and material worlds are one. The first time was in the Garden when our animistic worldview made no distinction between spirit and matter. That was before we left on our great learning adventure.

On the first leg of our evolutionary journey, civilization traversed a path that went deep into the nonmaterial domain of an off-planet God. After completing our exploration of the spiritual realm, humanity’s path momentarily passed through the midpoint again as its journey proceeded into the domain of materialism. That was the time when people of the Age of Enlightenment and deistic philosophy embraced both spiritual and material philosophy. The Declaration of Independence is a perfect example of blending spiritual idealism and practical realism. However, civilization’s flirtation with balance was fleeting because humanity was rushing headlong into the polar realm of scientific materialism.

Civilization’s forays into the polarities of spiritualism and materialism have provided us with deep insights into the nature of reality. And, now, as our evolutionary path is once again returning us to the midpoint, humanity is at a crossroads, confronted with two fundamental paths. We can either unite as a global community to assimilate and integrate our polarized insights, thus making a quantum evolutionary jump, or we can continue the bipolar insanity as religious and scientific materialist fundamentalists duke it out to be the last paradigm standing on a dying planet.

Whether or not we make this quantum leap depends upon how well we learn the lessons of the current and the previous paradigms. If we understand that evolution is the progression of accumulated awareness, then, perhaps, if we focus our collective awareness, we might just speed up the evolutionary process.

UNVEILING THE OLD, REVEALING THE NEW

In Part II, we take a close-up view of the life-threatening consequences of scientific materialism, our current basal paradigm. We specifically focus on four cultural beliefs that form the cornerstones of our current reality even though contemporary science has found each of them to be flawed, if not downright false. We present these beliefs as the Four Myth-Perceptions of the Apocalypse in reference to where we are likely headed if we keep going where we are going.

Modern society’s faith in or worship of the material realm has us hurtling down the track to a train wreck of Earth-shattering proportions. Continued economic growth from accelerated extraction of natural wealth is not sustainable. Treating the land as landfill and our air, water, and soil as final resting places for pollutants is suicidal. Warfare, as a method of problem solving, has actually taken us to the brink of the ultimate solution to the human problem: no humans, no problem.

Clearly, the current paradigm of scientific materialism is not up to the evolutionary task at hand. Nor can going back to religious monotheism, the prior paradigm, take us forward, either. We seem to be at a life-threatening impasse in the face of ominous apocalyptic predictions. The key to avoiding apocalyptic collapse, however, lies in appreciating the meaning of the word apocalypse—before it became a code word for “the end of the world.”

Originally, apocalypse meant a prophetic revelation, “a lifting of the veils.” It represented the exposure of something hidden and has, since the time of the Greeks, been associated with revelations that would occur at the end of time. A new—or, actually, old—interpretation of the word suggests that, by lifting the veil on our own invisible programming, we might yet avoid the inevitable train wreck that awaits us if we stay on the current track.

Scientific materialism has offered four tenets in the dominant basal paradigm that, until recently, have been accepted and regarded as indisputable scientific fact:

1. Only Matter Matters—the physical world we see is all there is.

2. Survival of the Fittest—Nature favors the strongest individuals, and the Law of the Jungle is the only real natural law.

3. It’s in Your Genes—we are victims of our biological inheritance and the best we can hope is that science finds ways to compensate for our inherent flaws and frailties.

4. Evolution Is Random—life is basically random and purposeless, and we got here pretty much the same way as an infinite number of monkeys pecking on an infinite number of typewriters over an infinite amount of time might produce the works of Shakespeare.

In the next four chapters, we trace the development of each of these tenets from their origins as myth-perceptions through the profound revisions offered by current science.

In Chapter 9, Dysfunction at the Junction, we will examine the consequences of taking each of these beliefs to its logical illogical conclusion. The institutions we examine—economics, politics, health care, and communications—all suffer from the same fatal affliction: they have pursued scientific materialism to the point of distortion and made money, materialism, and machinery more important and more valuable than human life.

Then in Chapter 10, Going Sane, we explore how we can make sane choices that will transform us from our current role as children of God to adults of God. We’ll see how we can synergistically learn from where we’ve been on this evolutionary path and, thus, become willing participants in our reconnection with each other, with Nature, and with the divine in all. We’ll learn how to embrace our untapped power—and to do so with kind, benign humility.

This examination of current situations and future possibilities is necessary because, if we look at the world with clarity, loving compassion, and even humor, we stand a chance of breaking free from this trance and achieving spontaneous evolution. Perhaps the most appropriate lens to use when looking at where civilization now stands is an entertainment genre that wouldn’t exist were it not for our worship of all things scientific: science fiction. As an example, consider the movie The Matrix.

In a scenario set in the near future, a young computer hacker named Neo finds himself in two parallel worlds. One world, the Matrix, seems to be the reality-as-usual world of everyday life in the Cyber Age. The other world is the world-behind-the-world where he discovers machine-like humanoids that keep living and breathing humans happily distracted while exploiting them as power-sources for the humanoids’ machinery. The vast majority of humans in Neo’s world, knowingly or unknowingly, have taken the blue pill of blissful or, at least, passive ignorance. Neo and his compatriots, Morpheus and Trinity, have taken the red pill, which is the much more dangerous path of awakening through which they step outside the Matrix.

Awakening to what? As Morpheus told Neo, “The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.” And Morpheus shows him a copper-topped battery. Considering that science fiction is often a predecessor for science fact—think of submarines in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea—we might do well to step outside the matrix of life and be curious about the world that has been spun out before us.

As we will see in our discussion of “weapons of mass-distraction,” most people have chosen the blue pill and have signed off on reality in favor of reality TV. However, every day, increasing numbers are opting for the red pill and are awakening to a world of awesome wonder and overwhelming confusion.

The confusion is clarified the moment we realize that much of what we perceive as natural human behavior is actually the consequence of developmental programming. In Part II, we describe how we came to accept beliefs that made sense once upon a time but are now contributing to the destruction of our world. With nobody telling us what else to do in the face of these crises, our programming has us feeling helpless in a situation that seems hopeless.

The real issue we must come to terms with is that, for millennia, we have been programmed to be powerless and, consequently, dependent upon others for our survival, especially in the areas of spirituality and health. Of course, fees were involved, and this exchange has significantly contributed to our current global crises. Yet there is an easy way out of our self-imposed matrix: we can simply reprogram our lives. By acquiring and acting upon new awareness, we afford ourselves an opportunity to rewrite the programs of cultural limitations.

The first step in reprogramming is deprogramming. We do this by examining the program from outside the matrix. How? In his book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle describes a time in his life when he was going through such despair and torment that he considered suicide. Then, a wild thought came to him: “Exactly who is the ‘who’ who wants to do away with whom?” With this epiphany, Tolle realized that he was also the observer outside the matrix, beyond the world of circumstance; this liberated him from attachment to the who whom he thought he was.¹

Quantum physicists tell us that our observations change reality. If this is indeed the case, the insights we offer regarding the four apocalyptic myth-perceptions and the human and societal dysfunctions they spawn should help you, and all of us, change the way we observe the world. Hopefully, that will enable us to awaken our collective consciousness and change our collective reality, as well.