The Greatness of this Day
Why the end of the world might not be such a bad thing after all
File Under: End of the World Essays
And the Great Spirit sent forth a sacred song
Which could be heard in all corners of the world,
And shamans were summoned forth—
From North, South, East and West.
And then these shamans journeyed
to the centre of the world,
so they could serve as witnesses to the healing of the Earth.
This is the introduction to the book “A Shaman’s Quest”, by Australian author Nevill Drury. It details the spiritual journeys of four Shamans from four different distinct Indigenous cultures around the world — including Australia’s — that lead them to fulfilling their roles in the creation of a new Earth.
It is fair to say that shamanic culture is unfamiliar to most of us, including myself — even though it is essential to the culture of the peoples who are indigenous to our colonised nations. Nonetheless, the central theme of the book can apply to each of us: we are all here, at this particular moment in time, to take part in the process of creating a new world.
This is a reality that has become increasingly clear to me as I have made my own journeys through life: through academia and science, religion and spirituality, and most recently as a conspiracy theorist (not giving the moniker up, sorry Dad). I have become convinced that we are not living in ordinary times, but are actually in the midst of a truly unique period of history, both for our species and our planet.
In this article, I want to explain this journey as best as I can, in the hope that I can convince you of the same. Because once you believe this to be true, you must believe — unless you are incredibly pessimistic or nihilistic — that we are here not just as passive observers, but to serve our own Shamanic role in this transformation process — one that has been foretold for centuries by cultures around the world. The uniqueness of this opportunity is what it means to say the Greatness of this Day.
Let us start with some basics. There is a conventional view of Earth history called ‘Uniformitarianism’, which suggests (no that’s too kind: tells us with absolute certainty) that our planet progresses in a uniform and linear trajectory.
Look, maybe, right? It’s a bit boring, but then much of conventional science seems to specialise in making the world out to be a boring place. But where do all these disaster movies, which we as a collective society seem obsessed with, come from? Is this the conspiracy theorist’s fallacy in another form: where we project our own dark desires for chaos and destruction out into an otherwise mundane and tiresome world?
Fortunately, in support of us Lachesism-believers, we also have a competing theory called “Catastrophism”: which — while undoubtably sounding a tad ominous — also sounds a whole lot more exciting. Under this theory, our Earth has in fact been indelibly shaped by a series of cataclysmic (I love that word) events — whether they be floods, eruptions, impacts from celestial objects, or a combination of each.
If I had to choose a paradigm for my life, it would be the latter theory; my experiences of progression have felt far from linear. That’s not to say there haven’t been slow and steady periods, because of course there have been: where we steadily and diligently advance in a largely desirable direction. But there have also been drastic shifts, usually catalysed around a single event, that have significantly altered the trajectory of my life: where many of the structures that propped up my existence suddenly fell away, being replaced by new ones that I hadn’t even realised I had been building up in the background.
We might call this, as young peeps might, to ‘level up’.
Well, turns out: the urge to view life through this more dramatic, non-linear lens isn’t just mine. It is actually captured in a whole academic field of study — crossing both the natural and human sciences — called ‘resilience theory’. I chose resilience theory as my PhD dissertation framework because of how much it resonated to me on a personal level. I have long been trying to work out how I can apply this theory in a way that is relevant to non-academic folk, and this might be my best chance.
You have probably heard the term ‘resilience’ before. You probably associate it with the general ability to ‘bounce back’ from adverse events (the term itself derives from the Latin word resalire, meaning ‘walking or leaping back’). The phrase ‘rolling with the punches’ also comes to mind.
But it is actually much more than that, in a wanky academic context anyway. Simply having the ability to persist in the face of adversity is all well and good, but may ignore the fact that such adversity has occurred for a reason — possibly even at least partially as a result of our own actions. Hence, to plod on, stubbornly yet steadfastly, without reflecting on the nature and causes of the adversity can simply lead to further, and likely more acute, adversity in the future.
Thus, resilience becomes fundamentally a process of coupling skills like learning, adaptation and transformation to the aforementioned virtues of persistence and steadfastness.
The beauty(?) of resilience is that it applies to all aspects and domains of life: whether our own internal psychology, or the broad scale functioning of an entire ecosystem. The detailed study of natural systems has shown that they too have the ability to store memory of events in the past, so as to better respond to adverse effects in the future. In fact, the word ‘adverse’ essentially becomes null and void in this context, as these disruptive events simply become catalysts to move forward in an evolutionary sense.
Resilience could be understood, perhaps, as a cheat code for the matrix we are caught up in — or, more extravagantly coz why not, the blueprint for the advancement of life on Planet Earth.
We can actually summarise this blueprint visually using the model of the ‘adaptive cycle’, made up of four distinct stages (see below). The first we might call Growth or Exploitation (r): a stage we are all familiar with on Earth. It is perhaps best summarised by the saying ‘making hay while the sun shines’; a slow and steady phase characterised of growth in and accumulation of resources and capital — as well as greater interconnectivity between the different components of the system. It is also the time when a system puts in place the foundations of a new kind of system to follow, even if it can’t see that future self yet.
This slower half of the adaptive cycle — the ‘fore-loop’ — finishes in the process of Conservation (K). As connectivity within the system reaches a maximum (something we can easily relate to our now times, with the rise of the internet), the overall functioning of that system becomes more internally regulated and constrained by its most powerful actors (think the control of information through censorship, or the control of people through increasingly onerous Government mandates).
While on the surface the system might seem to be running as efficiently as it ever has, this comes at the cost of the key aspects of resilience discussed above: namely the opportunities for learning, and in turn the potential for adaptation and transformation. This is essentially the ‘end is nigh’ stage, where the system has some awareness that the current cycle is becoming unsustainable, but persists nonetheless (due to the forces that still control it) for as long as possible; it has simply become too stuck in its formerly productive ways to change.
And that’s when the shit hits the fan, so to speak. All it takes is one event, whether internal or external, to suddenly push the system into the next phase of release (omega); the longer the conservation phase, the less of a final shock needed. This shift could literally happen overnight, which is why so many conspiracy theorists are hopelessly addicted to checking their phones first thing in the morning (so I’ve heard) — and have larger stores of food and water than your average Joe.
This stage is not for the faint hearted: the web of interactions that characterised the previous system is broken strand by strand, stability turns to uncertainty, and the world as was known quite literally falls apart.
The good news: this stage is only fleeting (fleeting in the overall time scale of the cycle anyway). The ‘nature’ of nature, so to speak, is to be inherently self-organising — hence the emergence of the final phase of re-organisation (alpha). It is not long before a new identity for the system begins to emerge from the chaos, created by a series of new actors who start to take control. Such actors are most likely those who hadn’t been caught up in the failing structures of the old world, and instead had the foresight to begin putting in place their own replacements in anticipation of this day.
But above all else, because the adaptive cycle is always orientated towards resilience: the leaders of this new world will be keen learners, those for whom the processes of adaptation and transformation come naturally; who not just survive but can thrive in the chaos of the final release.
The key takeaway from resilience theory and the adaptive cycle is the inevitability collapse and renewal: of an old system collapsing and a new one rising from its ashes. This is an inevitability that is encoded into the functioning of natural ecosystems: ecosystems that, in this day, humans have come to be an intrinsic part of (even though we might sometimes forget). I propose that, based on all available evidence, we are currently at the tipping point of this current cycle, and should start preparing ourselves accordingly.
I didn’t arrive at this conclusion when I first came across resilience theory. It started to dawn on me when I came across the work of Graham Hancock, who was essentially my gateway drug between the academic and conspiracy worlds. In the previous piece in this series (a series about what I am not quite sure yet), I wrote about the work of Hancock. He has spoken and written about many things, but this is his greatest contribution in my eyes: his documentation of the evidence — littered across the traditions of ancient cultures and religions around the world — that we are living though exceptional and unique times. Such a claim is expressed in various ways across these diverse traditions, as would be expected, but ultimately rests on the common underlying phenomenon of precession.
I have written about precession a few times, most notably here. If you can’t be assed going there, fair: there is also the surprisingly helpful Wikipedia page. The technical explanation for precession is a gradual turning of the constellations in the sky over time, based on a little know ‘wobble’ in the Earth’s axis. I find this explanation hard to get my head around, so this is how I understand it.
If you take a snapshot of the sky, at night, at the same time every year, you would see the zodiacal constellations arranged equally around the perimeter of the sky, much like the numbers of a giant clock. If you took the same snapshot at that same time every year — say the winter solstice, as our ancient ancestors would do — and repeat this year after year, you would see these constellations slowly turn in the sky: not unlike such a giant, very slow clock (except with the number on the outside turning, rather than the hands in the middle). So slow in fact, that it takes almost 26,000 normal years for the 12 evenly spaced zodiacal constellations to complete a full rotation — a time period the ancients referred to as the ‘Great Year’. This year is made up of 12 ‘months’ — or Ages — where each zodiacal sign holds dominance.
On the face of it, the precession of the zodiacs might seem like a fun if ultimately irrelevant cosmic accident. Not so fast say our ancestors: just like the 24 hour day and 365 day year represent distinct cycles in our life on Earth, so too does this 25,776 year Year. More specifically: the passing from the end of one Great Year to the next (which we are currently in the midst of, with the shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius) signifies the end of an old world and the start of new — a transition that the ancients tell us is a time of great upheaval and turmoil.
Let us accept the fact that, with so much evidence pointing in this direction, we appear to be at the end of our current slow and steady adaptive cycle fore-loop, also represented as the end of our zodiacal Great Year. That, as ominous and foreboding it might seem, the shift to our inevitable release phase, our new precessional cycle, could potentially happen in the very near future (technically tomorrow, as any Doomsday Prepper will remind you).
As drastic as it sounds, I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. In fact — call this a controversial opinion — perhaps the impending end of the world is exactly what we need to bring an increasingly divided society together.
Most of us are almost there, anyway. We know pretty well by now that large sections of the religious and conspiracy community believe the end is nigh: some in a more metaphorical sense, but others far more literally. We might not necessarily associate apocalyptic views with those on the more mainstream, secular side of the social spectrum, but they do seem to be coming on board as well: whether through climate collapse, or invisible pathogens, or racial extermination.
Let’s leave aside what (or who) the causes are of such impending societal collapse, and just settle on the common ground that it provides. Because it is not so much how we have gotten here that matters right now. What happens next is the big question, and where we all need to be turning out attention to. If we are about to enter a brief yet chaotic phase of release followed by re-organisation, what does this process look like, and where will we end up afterwards?
One of the great opportunities of the re-organisation phase of the adaptive cycle is that the future is literarily up for grabs. It could go one of three ways: fall back into a repeat of the previous cycle; collapse completely into a more degraded state; or (ideally) catapult into a unique phase of existence, never before seen or experienced.
Which will it be?
The answer is obvious, of course: whatever we choose. It will be the future that we decide to collectively manifest in our minds, and then bring into being with our actions.
There is one final concept that I have come across, one that reflects both my belief in the significance of our current time, but also my optimism in what comes next. It is from the Baha’i teachings, and it refers to the Greatness of this Day. Despite all the upheaval and chaos that we see in the world today, and which we are likely to see unfold in the near future, to be alive today is an immense privilege.
For like the Shamans summoned from the four corners of the Earth, we have been called upon to help shape the new world as the old one falls down around us. Let us not waste such an opportunity.