Ecstasy and the Eschaton

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,

Shunyamurti

Image courtesy of NASA Goddard Photo and Video.