What happens after the end?

I recently read a review, which I can’t give an exact reference for, in which the writer quoted an AngloSaxon archbishop writing in 1054 saying that the world is over, nothing more is to be expected before the return of Christ. (And we know what happened 12 years later!) I feel this an appropriate response to those today who feel the West is broken beyond repair. It probably is, but the reality is that something else will follow it – whether we like that something or not. So the choice is between embracing the uncertainty of changing times or allowing them to crush us. 

Perhaps our era is not so dissimilar to the era of Charles 1, which saw a late renaissance full of delicate spirituality (George Herbert and the metaphysical poets, Orlando Gibbons etc): yet it was also full of anger at the corruptions of privilege and the indifference of the monarchy to rising tide of proletarian literacy which was to explode as the puritan revolution. The same sensibility existed all over Europe among the intelligentsia (Rilke, Mallarmé, Yeats) before WW1, only to disappear entirely ithereafter. 

I don’t know what’s coming next, but if we want what we value to be part of it we have to throw ourselves into the ‘ungodly’—as it seems—tide. Standing Canute-like on the bank is to be sidelined by the new—perhaps deplorable—history being made and from which gestation a new stasis will sooner or later emerge. 

We don’t know what happens if we try something, but we do know what happens if we don’t. There’s nothing the matter with K’s arguments, but sadly there are no prizes for being right in abstract – or I might’ve won one! The big prize is for weaving a strand of rightness (clear-sightedness) into all the wrongness (which isn’t wrongness so much as stupidity parading its blindness). 

If you can do this job right, like a commando action in enemy territory, and find the sweet spot where the strand will fit and so be absorbed into the main weave – then your only real reward is to return to know that you have been a small organic link in the great chain of those who have carried the silver torch of what I call Yahwism, the inner unmediated wordless encounter with I AM. Like any secret mission, there are only a few people you can tell – to most it wouldn't make sense. But to me that is where dharma and karma meet. 

So: the game is lost: the game is all to play for. In every moment both statements are true. 

Love / truth / joy are words with no meaning unless WE make them true in our own lives. We cannot allow ourselves to be buried by the statistical evidence that change is impossible – or entropy wins :: the forces of hopelessness. 

And perhaps ultimately that is the flaw in K's book,—he limits the capacity of g/God or 'divine otherness' to work within the sprawling mess we have made of (and I would argue were designed to make of) creation because his mind is limited to the imaginable.

But the Powers That Be /Tao aren't – the unimaginable is stock in trade to him/her/it/them. So renewal / rebirth / regrowth is always possible, even if we totally duff up the planet and extinguish our own and other life-forms. 

But on a slightly less apocalyptic note, all that is certain is that when the new thought-forms do emerge they are unlikely to resemble the old.