Apocalypse Now Pt.1

Living in this post-apocalyptic world is not what I imagined it would be. Naively, I’d imagined a global cataclysmic event that only a few people would survive, and that the world as a result would be mostly unrecognisable from the ravages of the destructive forces. This dystopian fantasy of mine was a gross miscalculation of the real-world scenario that is unfolding before us. Yet still, it’s an approximation that falls within the realms of future possibility.

 Hollywood movies misleadingly portray the apocalypse as a world ending event that occurs sometime in the future. This is a modern misappropriation of the word apocalypse. The word that best describes such an event is Armageddon. Armageddon is “a terrible battle or war that some people think would lead to the total destruction of the world or the human race”.

 The etymological derivation of the word apocalypse is from 14th C Greece, meaning, “the lifting of the veil”. In this context, an apocalypse (noun) is not a singular event, in a future time, but rather a process of uncovering or unveiling that can happen gradually over time, or may have already happened in the past or is happening in the present.

 Psychologically, in my estimation, there are three major veils that mankind must contend with and transcend. The first is the veil of birth. This veil separates the uterine foetal experience from newborn life. We’ve all crossed this threshold to unveil the mystery of our own life.

 The second is the veil of death, which separates life from what lies beyond this life, even if what lies beyond this life is nothing. Death could be perceived as the ultimate unveiling. We’ll all cross this bridge when we come to it.

 The third great veil that confronts mankind is the veil of the unconscious. This veil separates the conscious mind from the unconscious mind and is responsible for us not knowing what we don’t know. This is the apocalyptic unveiling that I’m experiencing through diving into the shadows of my own unconscious mind.

 This unveiling of the unconscious results in previously unknown information emerging into awareness and becoming known. I refer here to intuitive knowing as opposed to evidential knowing. Relying only on evidence when evidence can be tampered with is capricious and inherently risky. Consciousness and awareness are virtually the same experience.

 There’s no coming to the light, except through the darkness. The darkness I refer to represents the unexplored realm of your unconscious mind. My personal approach to exploring the unconscious was through fifteen years of yoga and meditation, followed by another 15 years of deep psychedelic exploration.

 In my own experience, emerging from the dark and into the light has caused me temporary blindness, requiring a period of perceptual adjustment to re-orientate myself in the world. This is what waking up looks like through the lifting of the veil. Enlightenment is nothing more than a deep dive into the hidden darkness of your own soul and returning with the holy grail. It’s the hero’s journey of mythology.

 The times we live in call for a new type of hero. Not the costumed superhero of comic books and movies, but an everyday person kind of hero. We cannot rely on someone or something outside of ourselves to save us from peril, but rather rely on something inside of us. Something of our own creation that we lost connection with long ago. Lurking in the shadow of our unconscious mind we will find all the power we need to save us from peril, all we need to do is summon the courage to face it.