2012 or Apocalypse Now (really)

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf     
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind     
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.    
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.     
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,     
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends     
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.     
(From T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland")

***

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8: 20-23

2012--I haven't watched the movie, and I don't intend to, but I want to think out loud a bit about our fear of, or is it our need for, or perhaps longing for, "apocalypse".

The word in Greek means 'revelation' as in uncovering something hidden, and perhaps it is such a revelation we really want while fearing that the only way we get it is with the violence. If we have any sense, we recognize that things just can't keep going this way--something has to give. It just isn't working, and given our consensus materialist assumptions, I'd argue that we simply haven't the imagination of a way out of this impasse, or if we had an idea, we haven't the will to act on it. So since radical change is something we seem incapable of choosing, it's something we want ambivalently to happen to us, to suffer passively, and we therefore fear what we long for most.

We yearn for Apocalypse, an empowering revelation, some cleaning of the slate and the arrival of a political leader, an avatar, saint, bodhisattva, or the return of Quetzacoatl, or King Arthur, or Jesus on clouds with his angels.  For they will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  But of course, it just doesn't work that way.  (Does it?)

Nevertheless, we long for and fear some breaking of the dam, so that the world can be washed clean of everything in the current normal reality that obstructs the flourishing of what is healthful and sane. This is an archetypal longing felt most intensely during periods of decay. We're mostly sick of normal reality, because it just doesn't deliver.  It provides lots and lots of stuff, but little value.  Quality, or any natural sense for it,  is drowned in this torrent of quantity and our greed for even more. We've lost our collective sense of what matters and what doesn't, and we're reduced to arguing for the sake of arguing, because at least it gives some feeble sense that we're alive.  And so, if we have any sense, we're seeing normal more clearly for its insanity--that "normal" is, in fact, consensus insanity--and deep down we'd just as soon be rid of it. But there's the comfort factor; we'd just as soon not have to deal with too much change or too much reality.

We know there has to be something better than this, a better, deeper, richer kind of life, but we've lost hope that our "normal" institutions, whether cultural or political, can deliver what we need or show us a way to find it. These institutions are all sick and dying: the government, the Church, the traditions of art, literature, and theater--they're all in decay, all mired in silly if not outright destructive attitudes and behaviors;  they have no solutions that anybody will rally to or that inspire broad agreement. So for most of us it's either live in a state of acute, painful frustration or retreat to bread-and-circuses distractions, or some combination of the two, more one than the other depending on the day.

So we're forced to fend for ourselves, figure things out for ourselves, because nobody "in charge" seems to know what he or she is doing.  There's no help, no wisdom from the conventional sources--just cliches and bromides. There are all kinds of experts, but none sees the whole picture, none has any really satisfying answers. And the people who should be taken most seriously--people who usually occupy some some spot on the periphery of normal--are not. And our only solace is a decency and kindness we often enough encounter in ordinary folks of our acquaintance who can muster it despite the stress and anxiety that dominates their lives.

Some of us have a strong feeling that people in the past understood things that we don't, and we look to them for their wisdom, and it helps a little, but not enough to matter, because while we draw some sustenance from those who have preceded us, what we face has very little in common with what they faced. And even if we do, in fact, understand a thing or two, it's isolating, and it doesn't make a difference. It only matters if there's a collective shift, a shift in the consensus or collective imagination of what is real, the way people started seeing in three dimensions at the time of the Renaissance. The head trip part of this is not a solution. The solution only comes when lots of people have a common experience that begins the process of changing the "collective representations."

So we live in this painful awareness that in the issues that most deeply concern us we are powerless. We are fleas, even the most important and powerful among us, riding on the elephant of history, which has jumped the shark, and is teetering now, but not quite collapsed. And we're just waiting for it to happen, because maybe, for all the chaos that would come, it would be a relief, and then, maybe, there would be an opening for new possibility.  But, really, we don't want too much of a mess. Not comfortable. And so we are incapable of choosing what we most need, and indulge in fantasies like this movie about 2012, which embody both our deepest fears and our deepest hopes for a cleansing cataclysm.

***

I've started thinking about this over the weekend because when I was in the supermarket about a week ago I saw and bought on impulse Daniel Pinchbeck's 2006 book, 2012: The Return of Quetzacoatl.  I haven't read anything in this 'alternative reality' genre for a long time, and Pinchbeck's book is among the better ones I've read, kind of in the vein of Erik Davis' TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Davis is a far more knowledgeable and savvier observer than Pinchbeck, but Pinchbeck interests me precisely because his book is more personal, more engaged, more of a testament to the yearnings for apocalypse that I describe above, but in a cultural lefty, counter-culture idiom. He's intelligent and skeptical, but he wants to believe. 

And we have far more to learn from people like him than we do from the new atheists and the fundamentalists, whose conflict is just so tiresome, so yesterday.  I have very little interest in participating the worlds Pinchbeck reports on, but it's good to know about them. There's a lot of nonsense going on in these worlds, but also some things that need to be taken seriously. (By the way, I've just discovered Erik Davis's Website, which is worth exploring. He, too, is a counter-cultural lefty, but broad and sound in his sympathies and judgments. This appreciation of Chesterton's A Man Who Was Called Thursday will give you an sense of that.)

It’s clear from Pinchbeck's title that he's going for the dramatic by focusing on the Mayan predictions about the end of a 25,000 year cosmic cycle as perhaps pointing to some Apocalypse.  So sure, he needs to sell books, and there are moments when he seems profoundly self-delusional, but he comes back to us and to a more or less sane standpoint. He, too, is just thinking out loud, and we're in postmodernity, Baby, so anything goes, so we go for the ride. This is an honest piece of writing by a flawed human who is trying to figure things out, and these days you don't do that without showing the warts and blemishes. And so, as I did from Davis, I have learned a few things from him about stuff going on that I had no idea about.

For instance, Iboga root. It's a hallucinogen that when you ingest it forces you into a brutal encounter with all your moral failures. Apparently it's used in a therapy that has had some success in breaking people of drug and alcohol addictions, in part because of the way it confronts you with a vision of the ugliness and harmful consequences to yourself and others of your behavior. (I wonder what metanoia would be effected in the likes of sanctimonious fools like Joe Lieberman, James Dobson, or Mitch McConnell if they took it. Rahm Emmanuel would surely benefit, as well. I foresee a day when every  figure entrusted with the public trust should have to take a dose on the day he is sworn into office--and once a year on that day's anniversary.)  He also sums up the work in hallucinogenic exploration and neo-shamanic practice done by such counter-cultural folk heroes as the McKenna brothers. There is interesting stuff going on there, and I don't know what it means, but it's good to know about. It's all part of the bigger picture that is gradually coming into focus.

Another aspect of the book that I found intriguing was Pinchbeck's attempts to make sense of the UFO, alien abduction, and crop circles phenomena. His discussion confirms what I’ve already, without much thinking about it, more or less guessed at, which is that something real is going on here, but it doesn't have to do with aliens from another planet, but with the reappearance of beings from the earthly world of Faerie--the elementals and nymphs whom T.S.Eliot laments to have have departed. I've had a long-held bias that modern consciousness did not, in the light of its superior critical thinking capabilities, discover the non-existence of such beings; it just chased them away or developed a myopia that rendered it incapable of seeing what others from time immemorial took for granted.

What is the world of Faerie? I don't know, but a clue is suggested by Barfield in his Saving the Appearances where he says Nature is the human collective unconscious. It's not something over there while we're over here--it is us, and we are it. So as we plunge deeper into what it means to be human and uncover the deeper layers of the human, we will discover what the natural world is, truly is, not just its husks, which is all we see now. And why as St. Paul says all creation--not just the plant and animal kingdoms with which we are most familiar--groans in frustration, because its frustration is linked to human frustration. The educated consensus understanding now is that humans are a development out of nature, but I suspect the reverse is true, which is that nature is a development out of the human.  It's just that we have no clue what the term human embraces, and we cannot understand that so long as consensus reality is dominated by its materialist assumptions.

And so despite our everyday experience of it, we know, if we've thought about it at all, that the whole subject/object thing is a delusion, a temporary symptom of bad cultural programming. It's just a matter of time before its defining role concerning our relationship to the world of nature and to one another becomes something we leave behind. So I tend to think it is modernity that is delusional rather than premoderns when it comes to questions about whether the beings of Faerie exist, but that's just my bias, and it doesn't really matter, because even if such a world exists, the beings there are no more help to us than the being in the plant and animal kingdoms. They all depend on us and look to us to liberate them from their futility. Their destiny is linked to ours and to the choices we make.

Along these lines, Pinchbeck is also interesting in the way he tries to bring quantum physics and uncertainty theory into play. He certainly isn't breaking new ground here--the ideas he explores here have been explored elsewhere, better and more thorough, and for me it was Saving the Appearances, which introduced such ideas when I first read the book in the '70s. But Pinchbeck provides a decently explained reminder that once the collective consciousness catches up with the implications of what physicists understand, we'll return to the older view that Mind not Matter is the ultimate stuff of reality. Not as something we have to read the German Idealists to understand, but as something that we will understand from our everyday experience.

But for Pinchbeck's all these discussions are designed to setup to support the plausibility of a significant Apocalypse, a major revelation, the uncovering of what is now hidden, because already there are uncoverings everywhere. And for this he leans heavily on Jean Gebser, another guy I had never heard of, but like Barfield, one of these serious thinkers who flies under the radar, but who is in my view several decades ahead of everyone else. These grafs from the Wikipedia article on him will give you a sense about why:

His major thesis was that the stress and chaos in Europe from 1914 to 1945 were the symptoms of a structure of consciousness that was at the end of its effectiveness, and which heralded the birth of a new form of consciousness. The first evidence he witnessed was in the novel use of language and literature. He modified this position in 1943 so as to include the changes which were occurring in the arts and sciences at that time.

His thesis of the failure of one structure of consciousness alongside the emergence of a new one led him to inquire as to whether such had not occurred before. His master work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (German, Origin and Present), is the result of that inquiry. It was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953, and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin. Working from the historical evidence of almost every major field, (e.g., poetry, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, religion, physics and the other natural sciences, etc.) Gebser saw traces of the emergence (efficiency) and collapse (deficiency) of various structures of consciousness throughout history.

He's somebody I plan to catch up with, and write more about. Mayan prophecies or cosmological calculations are not Gebser's concern, but he makes the case that the conditions are ripe for another major shift in consciousness. So who knows?

So here's the thought that I've been playing with in the last week: maybe the Apocalypse, the moment of revelation, is when the collective consciousness finally catches up, finally gets what the physicists get, and what Barfield, Gebser, and the neo Shamans get, which is that our materialist collective representation of the world is a shriveled sham, and that nothing is really possible, no movement forward, no real growth or development, until that collective representation is shattered, and the deeply real that is sealed off behind it comes flooding into our collective awareness. Then we can begin to move again away from the tyranny of quantity toward a renewed sense of the quality and depth in things.

Things like this happen. They happened in what Jaspers calls the axial period--in Golden Age Athens, India, and Israel at the same time something was afoot. Something similar happened in fifteenth-century Florence, and in the first centuries around the Mediterranean. These somethings that happen have profound ripple effects throughout the world. It can happen again, but as in those instances, it doesn't solve all the problems; it just opens up new possibilities with a new set of  problems, and really, isn't that what we really want? Not for some final destination, but simply to get unstuck, to break the impasse, to find a way out of this materialist dead end.

So Apocalypse is not about arriving at any endpoint; it's about the end of one age and the beginning of another with new assumptions, a new way of comprehending the real. It's about the obstructions that make it so difficult to hope and move break up so that something new can be born. I don't think such an Apocalypse is a complete impossibility, and whether it comes in 2012 or 2052 or whenever, I think we all sense that something has to give, and it would be nice if we could effect some broadly based, collective metanoia without much pain, but that's not likely, and we know it, and we're anxious, so we fantasize about ecological disasters or alien invasions, because we have to attach our free-floating collective anxiety to something, but, really, all we need is to change our minds.