By Amanda Moreno
Earlier today in a conversation with a friend, she mentioned that she doesn’t want to feed into apocalyptic consciousness. And I suddenly became aware of just how apocalyptically conscious I am. I might be a member of the last generation to have a choice in the matter, actually. And although I can see how getting attached to the apocalyptic can be detrimental, I’d say that much of the drama invoked has the potential for constructive re-birthing of our entire paradigm — if we can harness the energies.
I often hear people downplaying or detaching from the current state of the world, which in my eyes is in a state of spiritual crisis. They point to the fact that at any given point in history there’s pretty much been some group who has thought that the end was nigh. The conversation quickly swings towards an insinuation that apocalyptic thinking and thinkers are being over dramatic.
There’s a lot of truth to that. Throughout history, humanity has faced various crises that churn up chaos or conflict at physio-psycho-spiritual levels. It would indeed appear that we are once again facing such a crisis. I’d say that this time is a bit different, however. The threat of the end of the world is no longer just an ambiguous idea.
This time around we’ve not only engineered and facilitate several ways of wiping ourselves out, but we have technology that allows us to view the images of our own destruction at a scale never before seen. The modern psyche is increasingly subjected to apocalyptic memes and the accompanying images of war, genocide, nuclear and ecological holocaust, threats to our food and water supplies, and so on. To some, that is over-dramatic. To me, it’s just a realistic outlook.