The Third Coming

The deluge is coming. It's time to build the Ark.

It is a perfect storm of crises that promise to destroy L’Ancien Regime. The elites are old, corrupt, and tyrannical. They fight amongst themselves, and they send the young to die in foreign wars. Ordinary people are chained in debt, and see no hope. Climate crises ravage farmland, and launch a tidal wave of migration that inundates fragile societies.

Which time period am I describing?

I could be describing today. America’s forever wars and climate change are forcing millions of refugees and migrants into the West, tearing apart their social fabric. Corruption, debt, and inequality risk igniting civil unrest around the world. World War III seems about to explode any day now.

I could also be describing the Bronze Age Collapse, in which Mycenaean Greece (of Trojan War fame) was burned to ashes, Egypt forever weakened, and the Mediterranean world plunged into piracy and poverty. I could also be describing late medieval Europe, in which the Black Death killed at least one-third of Europe.

In both instances, a poet-prophet emerged to help humanity achieve a greater evolution. During the Greek Dark Ages, Homer came to sing of the glories of the past so that the Greeks could see the wonders of the future. During the European Dark Ages, Dante came to teach Europeans how to imagine the Light. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey would birth Greek civilization, still considered our greatest civilization. Dante’s La Commedia would birth modernity, and the world that we live in today.

With the destruction of the world, there will be a Third Coming. This crisis will prove devastating, and possibly kill billions. It may also enable us to imagine civilization in a way that allows us to achieve our ultimate destiny.

I have faith that with the world’s end and the washing away of all institutions and prejudices we humans can achieve a collective consciousness.

In future posts, I will explain in detail this psychic Internet (what I call the “Ether”): what it is, how we can achieve it, and what we can do with it. Today I will discuss how we can build the Ark to ensure that what is best about us survives the Flood.

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In the movie “2012” scientists discover environmental catastrophes are about to end the world. To finance the saving of the world, the world’s wealthiest (including celebrities, tycoons, and athletes) are permitted to purchase seats on three spaceships. The funniest part of the movie is when it is revealed that these Arks are being built in the Tibetan mountains because only the Chinese can build so quickly.

The movie is silly for too many reasons. First, if the world is ending, the last thing anyone should do is get on a spaceship made in China. Second, why would anyone want to save celebrities, tycoons, and athletes? I would think that scientists, politicians, and generals would prioritize saving their own families. Third, everyone is concerned with saving themselves to bother saving civilization. Without civilization, we cease to be alive.

Our forthcoming mission is not to save ourselves, but to save civilization itself.

To do so we must remember how Homer and Dante created civilization. Embedded within and emanating throughout the Iliad, the Odyssey, and especially the Divine Comedy is the ultimate Truth: “Love is the unifying force of the universe, and the imagination is the animating force.”

Dante explains this well in La Commedia. God is the Light of the universe, and this Light shines in all of us, connecting us to God and to each other. We call the Light within us “love,” and when we direct it fully at another person it burns so brightly in us that it connects us with God. His knowledge becomes ours.

Because we have physical bodies our understanding of this knowledge becomes refracted through our experience. This activates and augments our imagination, which increases God’s knowledge.

Because God is omniscient, by definition it cannot have an imagination, and thus it relies on our imagination to expand itself. When we imagine, we can channel the power of God to re-shape reality. As Milton wrote in Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Our mission is to transmit this truth, and make it the basis for a new civilization. A civilization is not books or technology or people. A civilization is first and foremost an act of imagination.

To that end, we need three major elements:

1. We need scholars to preserve Homer, Dante, and the wisdom of the human experience.

2. We need educators who can understand and teach these Great Books to everyone else.

3. We need people to support these scholars and educators in their mission.

This is the first principle we must appreciate. The Ark is not a ship or a physical construct. It is first and foremost an intellectual community. It comes together at first to study and preserve the Great Books, and to anticipate the unraveling of the world. Over time, as this unraveling becomes more apparent, this community adapts to this unraveling, and this process of adapting teaches it how to be:

· open (constantly asking questions)

· flexible (constantly experimenting)

· resilient (constantly reflecting and learning from mistakes)

If the world ultimately unravels, this community now has the capacity to re-build civilization.

Where will this community be based, and who ought to comprise it?

Aye, there’s the rub. With climate change causing droughts and famines, wars raging over resources and religion, and human migration destroying nation-states and borders, no corner of the earth will be spared. There are those who believe New Zealand offers safe harbors, but in a time of crisis everyone will be flocking to safe harbors, and thus destroying them.

This brings us to the second principle. The Ark has to be a global movement of communities. We do not know which regions of the earth will be safe, so we need to have communities implanted in different geographic areas. We can imagine that there will be a breakdown of global systems of communications and trade, and so these communities need to be independent, organic, and self-sustaining. They need to be tolerant and generous, welcoming all.

This creates another problem. We can imagine that there will be other more powerful groups that are all vying for scarce resources, especially humans to enslave. These include city-states, military units, corporations, bandits, and religious cults.

This brings us to the third and final principle of the Ark. To survive, these communities need to be strategic and diplomatic, forming alliances with competing powers. But ultimately the communities of the Ark must be willing to fight and die for what they believe in. It is the sacrifice and devotion of these communities that will allow them to dominate and win over opposing powers.

But these communities must remember that their mission is not to become another empire that will decline and decay. They must help humanity escape the doom loop. They must work together to create the Ether, a new period of collective consciousness that allows us to transverse dimensions, imagine realities, and unlock eternity and infinity.

In my next post, I will offer some insights into the Ether.

Notes and References:

1. If you’re interested in the Bronze Age Collapse, I recommend this YouTube talk by Eric Cline:

2. If you’re interested in Dante’s La Commedia, I have a couple of talks explaining its meaning and impact. Here’s the first: