Unveiling Apocalypse: Reflowering the Tree of Life (Part I)

Abstract

In this three-part article, the author will survey and discus the wider, deeper backdrop of apocalypse as part of our existential condition over the last two thousand years and extending into the next century. Apocalypse is an expression of a sense of future-shock, of political domination by corrupt world powers, of military turbulence and genocide on a vast planetary scale. In many ways this has been a burgeoning reality ever since the agricultural revolution. It was certainly the case around the time Revelation was written. Today we are facing a much huger planetary apocalyptic crisis, in which we have gained the powers to effectively destroy much of life on Earth and ourselves through nuclear holocaust and are having impacts which are leading to irreversible changes in the climate, ocean levels and biological and genetic diversity, diminishing our own survival prospects as a species in the process. The author argues that apocalypse is a motif in every person's existential consciousness in the sense that we seek to understand the ultimate mystery of existence and come face to face with it before we pass away into oblivion. The author also argues that the 'unveiling' of reality is also absolutely central to the scientific revolution. As we have progressed from the first wave of Greek science through to the Renaissance and the flowering of the Western scientific tradition, the covers have well and truly been thrown off reality. With our own generation, "apocalypse now" has become an even more potent planetary reality - nuclear weapons of mass destruction, overpopulation, mass extinction of genetic diversity and climate change. We are thus literally facing planetary apocalypse, if we don’t get a grip on our own folly and the impacts of business-as-usual on the planetary future.

Part I of this three-particle includes: 1. The Dilemma of Apocalypse; 2. The Deeper History of Apocalypse; and 3. Planetary Apocalypse Now.