Language immanentizes the
Eschaton. The hyperdimensionality of the Supreme Real is lost in the
flattened intellectualized reflection that discourse forces upon our
supramental intuition. To say that the Eschaton is upon us is to
recognize that the Real Itself is morphing into the monstrous, invading
our imaginaries, seizing up our symbolic defenses, and finally forcing
us to face the beyond of language. We are entering that beyond, one way
or another: through horror that is unspeakable, sadness that cannot
control its tears, or infinite ecstasy that unfolds as the Eschaton
embodied as the ultimate paradox that is the Self.
Many people
still want to waste time arguing over how serious a crisis is this
really; or, whether any leader can be trusted to guide us through the
transition; or, whether the vaunted goal of transcendence of the ego is
even more than a mirage; or if renunciation of egoic jouissance is
useful, healthy, and a necessary part of a redemptive path; or whether
grace will simply descend upon us all one day, no matter if we are
meditating and fasting, or drinking beer and watching tv.
Thankfully,
there is no more time for such barren debates. Civilization is breaking
apart; unpredictable catastrophes are occurring daily in every part of
the world; the ecological die-off accelerates, murdering our oceans and
our lands; the climate continues to morph our sacred planet savagely
into a world that is uninhabitable; while armies and bands of guerrillas
everywhere continue an irrelevant armed struggle, either to defend or
to overthrow a system that is doomed, no matter which side wins.
There is no winning any more.
There is no narrative that can grasp the enormity of this situation that
is self-created as a karmic backlash to our existential malfeasance as a
species. How can we explain the worthlessness of our lives to our
children? How can we face them and admit that we do not leave them a
future, that we have destroyed our home? There are no words deep enough
to express the shameful feelings, were our hearts open enough even to
have such feelings as we deserve to suffer.
In a more creative
time, operas would be performed about this Event. But there is no Wagner
now to present this Egotterdammerung of the Real, to compose a sonic
tragedy about the decomposition of our world in the utter madness of
petty bureaucratic sanity. New Guantanamos are being built to house the
growing legions of our voiceless prophets of doom, while the media drone
on about the drone wars, and drone-like we daily lose more of what is
left of our souls. The Eschaton will not be televised, although we are
already seeing reruns of its prequels.
Yet the true Eschaton is
not the mere end of a world, but the transcendence of the ultimate
illusion, the Mahamaya. Apocalypse means uncovering, and what is being
uncovered is the omnipotent Real that relativizes all our versions of
reality, our phenomenal plane of petty concerns. It is a revelation that
radically fuses life with death and time with eternity. The ego itself
dissolves in the impotence of language to control or even grasp the
meaning of this immeasurable Event.
All our projects aimed at
the approval of some Other are rendered laughable, even those intended
for an extraterrestrial Other or a divine Other, let alone a human
Other. The ego can do no one any favors except by dying. There is no
possible justification by works any more, except to provide a space in
which egos can come to die in peace, to offer a requiem for souls in
torment. All we are capable of understanding is that there is no way to
understand all this, and the only payment acceptable is the renunciation
of the ego. Silence is the final refuge.
Acceptance can result,
acceptance not of future death, of the ending of a world, but
acceptance of the unbearable truth that nothing ever was: only a dream
in the vast emptiness of cosmic mind.
How many universes have
there been before ours, utterly unremembered? How many planets have gone
through a similar Eschaton as ours now faces? How many times has our
own planet reached this point? How many lost civilizations still lie
buried under layers of earth and fathoms of water? How much will we
never know of this reality? Is not all history just a grand lie? Do we
even know anything at all? Not even our own history as individuals is
anything but a private myth. Yet all these narratives have somehow
conspired at achieving the grandest climax of all, forcing the ultimate
unmasking at this midnight of the world, the unmasking of the emptiness
at the heart of all that is.
Yet who is here — behind all your own
most tenderly cruel masks — what last edge of subjectivity is there to
witness this final denouement? What holy or unholy ghost really runs the
soft machine? Are you ready to discover That?
Past all
imaginings of light and love, past all mythologies of heaven and hell,
past all dreams both collective and personal that we have futilely
plastered over the black hole of the fast-approaching singularity, past
all hope of some deus ex machina saving us from our fate, past even the
peace of pain-free reflection on our destined demise, can we at this
last moment in which there is still margin of separation from the failed
death of mere unconsciousness, resign our attention to the Absolute,
and attain the Liberation that some unknowable nucleus that is beyond
Being, yet within us, still pulses valiantly to realize?
This
supreme ecstasy that beats ever more intensely in the Heart, the ecstasy
of freedom, freedom from knowing, from becoming, from yearning — this
Ecstasy the ancient Shaivite sages called Anuttara, the total surrender
to the ultimate and unsurpassable delight, the nameless, formless
deliverance from even the cosmic mind, deliverance from the creation and
from the nothingness before creation, this is the secret of the
Eschaton.
The true Ecstasy, that no experience can reveal, that
no entheogen can illumine, no eucharist can invoke, the Beyond that I
forever am, is itself the Eschaton. Now Here This.
Namaste,
Image courtesy of NASA Goddard Photo and Video.
