The Hypnosis of Doom: We Can Break Free of It

A Presentation of my Substack Newsletter

Thank you for your interest in END OF CYCLE, my new publication on Substack.

By subscribing to this newsletter you will receive regular posts addressing a wide range of subject matter, often at a couple of removes from the latest news. But while there will be a diversity of theme, there will also be an underlying unity of outlook informing what I write. That bigger picture is based on a view of our present world as the last and culminating stage of a long historical cycle. Living through such a stage is bound to be a challenging experience. My aim with this newsletter is to cast light on the challenges as they come up for us, so that broader patterns may emerge through the seeming chaos of surface events.

Why This Moment in History is Unique

One way of getting a sense of these patterns is to see how they have played out on other occasions over the course of history. For we have been here before, many times, only on a more localised scale. Cultures, civilizations, empires have arisen, climbed to their apogee and then declined. And in their decline they have manifested, each in its own way, many of the strange symptoms we are experiencing now.

Social dislocation sliding towards chaos has been reflected in an inner loss of orientation, a hollowing out of shared values, creeping corruption, a growing acrimony and at the same time a cynicism that can see nothing worth defending. And by way of reaction an ever more authoritarian state attempts, vainly in the end, to impose through coercion what can no longer be gained by assent.

But also at a more subtle level the declining curve has expressed itself through an uneasy yet growing sense of unreality. Where the civilisation at its height had a confident relationship to the world, and the world in turn appeared to have an objective, well-ordered character, now in its declining phase things become increasingly bizarre and incongruous, slipping in their final phases into something like a phantasmagoria, a collective delirium. Once things get to that stage the society loses the ability to defend itself, and sometimes even the will to do so, and so it either collapses from within or is overrun from without.

The bigger picture presented here is based on a view of our present world as the last and culminating stage of a long historical cycle.

Our own reality is already exhibiting the full gamut of these symptoms. But there is also an obvious difference between then and now. For in the past a civilisation could decay and crumble in one part of the world, while in some other part a new power was rising. That may not have been much consolation to the declining power, which likely existed in its own world of meaning, or was not even aware of the existence of other parts of the globe. Nevertheless looking back from a global perspective we would see a mixed picture of burgeoning here and withering there, of different regions, cultures, peoples living out a destiny in large measure separate from that of others.

Such is obviously not the case now. In our current globalised world we can speak - we have to speak - of the fate of mankind as a whole. For over the course of recent centuries, and in a much more accelerated way in just the last few decades, that fate has been welded very nearly into one. It has become the fate of humanity itself, and of the Planet on which we live. That means we are facing the possibility of a planetary end of cycle, and not merely a cycle played out through the death of one civilisation existing among a patchwork of others.

Fearing the Future, Clinging to the Past

We can observe two broad reactions to this unprecedented state of affairs, two responses which are doubtless commingled within each one of us in varying degrees. The first response is to be oppressed by forebodings about the future. The second is to get on with our own lives as best we can, hoping against hope that the future will not be as grim as we suspect it will be, and that we will muddle through somehow as we have done so often in the past.

It is curious to note that these two reactions are approximately reflected in the public sphere by two broad ways of seeing the world. On one side there are shrill voices telling us that all is lost unless the most radical counter-crisis measures are put into effect forthwith. On the other side there are those who warn against exaggeration, advocating instead for pragmatic modifications within a broader continuity. The old Left-Right divide inherited from the epoch of class politics has been largely reformulated around this new divergence.

In the course of that reformulation the Left in particular has undergone a major reversal of identity. Where the radicals of the past argued for utopian transformation, their counterparts today are mainly preoccupied with forestalling dystopia.

This they propose to do through an ever more invasive control of people’s thoughts and behaviour, effectively allying themselves with surveillance capitalism to promote a cure which would surely be far worse than the disease. Conservatives in response have attempted to uphold the old way of doing things, yet have hardly been able to hold back a tide of change that seems to have a momentum of its own.

We are currently facing the possibility of a planetary end of cycle, and not merely a cycle played out through the death of one civilisation existing among a patchwork of others.

The perspective I will be developing here does not align with either of these outlooks. A conservative approach attempting merely to rein in the madness does not I believe have the measure of the times. By contrast the Left in its Woke incarnation is a far more fitting expression of the peculiar character of our age - but in all its most negative aspects. Indeed Wokeism is nothing less than a catalyst of dissolution, for it corrodes reason, fractures identity and undermines sensible responses to the problems confronting us.

The Wokeist phenomenon could arise only at a fairly advanced stage of spiritual decomposition, and it feeds back into that decomposition to promote it further. Add to the mix the compulsive patterns of distraction and shortened attention span associated with screen addiction, not to mention addiction to substances, and the tendency towards enslavement and disintegration becomes even more evident.

All of this is very much as one might expect from a long global cycle entering its terminal phase. Without an understanding of that larger context, however, the situation is bound to cause dismay and bewilderment, not to say an oppressive sense of powerlessness.

The Deep Currents Guiding us Forward

The challenge then is to broaden our vision so that the fretful incoherence of the present moment appears in a more ample perspective. This can only happen as we reconnect with the inner truth of ourselves, so that the surface turbulence is experienced so to speak from the depths of the ocean rather than through the crests and troughs of each successive wave. And so we can either stay on the surface of things and be buffeted relentlessly, or we can connect with the deep sea currents that will take us where we need to go as we learn to trust them.

Those currents are taking us all forward anyway, whether we align ourselves with them or not. Where they are taking us is towards destruction and liberation. For we cannot have one without the other. The destruction may very well take a physical expression, but more likely it will be more subtle in nature, bringing about the erosion of the values we cherish, even the most basic ones, and the undermining of even the simplest forms of rational behaviour.

The kind of fear-induced mass hypnosis exhibited during Covid already represented a major lurch in that direction. But the trend had been building before, and presumably will continue and become more exacerbated going into the future.

We can either stay on the surface of things and be buffeted relentlessly, or we can connect with the deep sea currents that will take us where we need to go as we learn to trust them.

The net result of this trend will be to deprive us of our dependable points of reference as the world becomes ever more bizarre and phantasmagorical. This loss of externalised bearings, painful in itself, can have the result of throwing us back on our inner resources, finding in these a richness we had previously overlooked. At the same time we realise that while our fixed points of reference may have given shape and coherence to our lives, they also constructed a kind of prison which we reinforced by ingrained habits of thought and feeling.

Destruction then can have a liberatory character if it wrests away from us what we thought we couldn’t live without, thereby revealing the calm impersonal power within which can never be shaken. Then the world begins to lose its hold over us the way a bad dream does as we waken from it, bewildered and relieved.

A Cosmic Perspective

We may feel that we live in unprecedented times, and in a way we do, yet all of this was anticipated by the great seers of the past. Thus we find in Hindu cosmology that the world proceeds through four stages of gathering moral decline, analogous to the golden, silver, bronze and iron ages of Greek mythology. The last of these four epochs for the Hindus is called Kali Yuga, an age of darkness and confusion where the demonic forces are in the ascendant, and Dharma or cosmic and natural law is trampled underfoot.

But there is one significant difference between the Hindu and Greek views. For the Greeks it was simply a misfortune to be born into the iron age, when the glow of the Olympian gods had all but faded from human existence. For the Hindus, however, the understanding of life as an absorbing dream yields quite a different view of the matter.

Destruction can have a liberatory character if it wrests away from us what we thought we couldn’t live without, thereby revealing the calm impersonal power within which can never be shaken.

Kali Yuga is the worst age in which to live, no doubt, but it is also the most propitious for awakening from the whole cosmic cycle. The earlier ages allowed us to dream more or less undisturbed, but the nightmarish character of Kali Yuga has the potential to prod us out of our slumbers. We all know that we are more likely to awaken from a nightmare than from a pleasant or indifferent dream. This is true in the individual instance, but it can also hold good in the case of humanity as a whole.

Speaking for myself I can say there is no past time I would have chosen over this time now. Truly I feel it is an honour to live at this moment. Even when feelings waver and the mind confuses matters with its fears and uncertainties I know that the fog will clear, giving way to a joy gathering within that nothing can touch or overcome.

Joy is one, and yet as refracted through the human soul it can assume a rich variety of nuances. Victorious joy is one of these. It is what we experience when the evil of this world squirms impotently within a calm light, and we realise that the source of that light is not other than the innermost truth of what we are.

Welcome to End of Cycle!