An Imaginal Revelation
Apocalypse as Revelation and Rebirth by Theodore Richards
[The following contains excerpts from the book The Great Re-imagining: Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse (Wayfarer, 2nd edition, 2024)]
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men—go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with mothers of families—re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body... The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet."
- Walt Whitman, 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass[i]
Apocalypse is an act of the human imagination. It is so easy to forget that; for we inhabit a literal worldview, and impose literal thinking on even something as profoundly mythic as apocalypse. When we think of apocalypse, we also only think of the destruction, of what dies. We forget that apocalypse is revelation. Something is being born. Just as, for Ibn Arabi, the creation of the cosmos was an act of divine imagination, so too is the apocalypse an act of human imagination. It is the moment when we can re-imagine the world, re-create the world. It is the moment of revolution—not the revolution that replaces the one form of oppression with another and places a new group on the top of the hierarchy; rather, it is the revolution that turns the world upside down, the first becoming last.
Apocalypse is a rite of passage. For millennia, we have watched our children come into the world and cut the umbilical cord, recognizing that this is an act that has repeated itself and will repeat itself countless times: From singularity, new forms arise that become separate from the mother who birthed them. Paradoxically, this very insight teaches us that we never really are separate.
Our shamans learned to break through the cosmic barrier to reveal new ways of understanding our place in the universe. And we celebrated the passage of time—birth, coming of age, death—with our rites of passage celebrations. In the apocalyptic moment, we experience a collective re-birth, a collective rite of passage. We break through the cosmic barrier to uncover a new cosmology, a new consciousness.
Like all births, this one has the seeds of both beauty and trauma. Destruction and creation come together. Psychic and physical transformation cannot be entirely separated. The Earth dies along with the human heart. And so, we experience the end of both world and worldview, cosmos and cosmology. The inner and the outer cannot be separated.
The edges that we have reached are manifold. Our technologies and our economy have brought us to the singular loneliness of the ultimate abstraction. We seek after salvation in the form of information-based technologies, unaware that this is no solution, but the ultimate consequence of an old dream of Manichaean alienation from body and Earth. Replacing authentic relationship with information, we find ourselves at the edge of not merely loneliness, but also of a psychic alone-ness that is absolute—a singularity.
Capitalism’s voraciousness has led us to another abyss. We run out of resources and peoples to exploit, so we privatize our own culture. As a consequence, we have threatened our wilderness, inhibiting our own wildness; we have destroyed the biodiversity upon which our ecosystems depend, leading to a diminishment of the cultural diversity on the planet. Globalization leads us on a path to realize that absolute singularity of our planet: It is a circle, another Easter Island.
Our planet, the biosphere, relies on biodiversity to remain viable. The human requires cultural diversity to remain viable. We risk reducing humanity to a single, global, Capitalist culture, a culture of abstract disembodiment and individualism; we risk reducing the planet to a paved, anthropocentric space. This is the dream of our culture—the telostowards which we strive. Its only result is apocalypse. Death—and a rebirth that is possible only with the imagination.
In astrophysics, a singularity is represented by a black hole. It is the loneliest place in the cosmos, a single point of such gravity that nothing can escape from it. Astrophysicists understand them only in theory, for they are impossible to visit, or even to see. One theoretical notion about them is that at the end of the black hole, the point of singularity, is a “white hole”, the Big Bang of the birth of an alternate Universe.
And so, the psychic singularities of human-Earth apocalypse can also bring forth “Big Bangs”. And humans create worlds through symbolic language, through art, through stories. We create new myths as new worlds. The most pressing question, for us all, is what is the mytho-poetics of this moment? What is the new story we must tell about who we are and our place in the cosmos? The revelation of this apocalypse does not come from beyond; it comes from us.
The role of imagination must be prominent in any apocalyptic vision; for it is, by definition, unknowable beyond the veil of the cosmos. Our earliest human ancestors distinguished themselves as mammals who could care for one another, who could build community, but also, most significantly, who could imagine a world into being. Imaginal worlds, mythic worlds, were created and co-created, imagined and re-imagined as we sat, for millennia, under the stars. But slowly, we moved from the mytho-poetic consciousness to the literal. This is a journey that has its roots in the earliest days of Western civilization.[ii] The challenge is that getting to the other side of the veil, where a mytho-poetic consciousness resides, requires that very mytho-poetic consciousness.
And what would this new mythos look like? Although we cannot know for certain, we can imagine it. And, in some cases, we can even remember it; for there are elements of the new mythos that are as old as the cave paintings.
First, we must journey from abstraction to embeddedness. The Earth is dying; and it is largely dying due to our alienation from her and the natural processes of which we are a part. Our economic system and its values are dependent upon and reinforce those values—of abstract economies and disembodied individuals. The new mythos must remind us to feel the texture of the world, and to be a part of that world again. To taste the wind and the rain, to get our hands dirty and to see ourselves, again, as ecological beings.
This requires the journey from the mechanistic to the organic. We know, already, that the dualistic and mechanist view of the world is part of a worldview and a science that—while not exactly wrong—was incomplete. To see the world as machine is useful for an economy of extraction and exploitation, but it ultimately leads to our demise. The organic world, the world of our ancestors, allows us to experience the world holistically rather than dualistically.
All these mean that we experience our world as self, and our selves as the world. Within us is the entire cosmos. There is no such thing as the individual self; and the individualism of Modernity has led us to the brink of apocalypse.
Although some may think the use of apocalyptic language to describe this moment in human history is hyperbolic or alarmist, I would suggest that what I am offering is rather mild. Our situation is dire; only a thorough, worldwide revolution could break the spell of consumption that has leads us to our destructive patterns. The prescription I am offering does not involve military action or a violent revolution. Rather, I am suggesting that something deeper is required, a changing of the patterns in our way of life and in our worldview. This transformation must be a spiritual revolution. But it is one that is so thorough that it even transforms what we mean by spiritual.
We can only approach this edge with an honest unknowing—to pretend otherwise is to court the hubris that has brought with it so much trouble in the first place. But we must also do so with a sense of genuine power. Not the power of false and shrunken egos that need to own a world that they cannot feel a part of, but the power of people who bring with them an entire cosmos of wisdom, the power of a people who come from the stars and can make worlds with their words, their minds, their hands. At the edge of the world, we must find also the courage to leap into the abyss, knowing that there is no alternative but to be reborn.
[i] Walt Whitman, Speciman Days and Collect (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2014) p. 311
[ii] See Plato’s Phaedrus
Theodore Richards is an educator, poet, and philosopher, and the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project. His work is dedicated to re-imagining education and creating new narratives about our place in the world. He has received degrees from various institutions, including the University of Chicago and The California Institute of Integral Studies, but has learned just as much studying the martial art of Bagua; teaching in various settings and students; and as a traveler from the Far East to the Middle East, from southern Africa to the South Pacific. He is the author of eight books and numerous literary awards, including two Nautilus Book Awards and three Independent Publisher Awards. He lives on the south side of Chicago with his wife and three daughters.
For more information go to his website www.theodorerichards.com
 | A guest post by
|