The Shape of Things to Come

A long time ago, I worked with a man who began to assiduously study the Book of Revelations, or the Apocalypse, and the End of Times. We had many long discussions about it. His intuition about the future was correct because his way of life suddenly ended. His young wife had a stroke and she required a long rehabilitation. They had three children at this time, the eldest being no more than 10. He continued to work. His life turned upside down.
Then within two years when she was much better, she suddenly decided to live with some other man, divorce my friend in the wake of her departure, and contest child custody tenaciously.

I would say that his intuition of the future, the End of Times, was essentially correct. He used the wrong conscious imagery, however, to bring it into the light of his everyday mind. I once had a dream that I did not recall upon waking. I read the comic strip Doonesbury and in the last frame, the expression “sea snakes” occurred, referring to the sea off the coast of Vietnam. Suddenly a memory of a dream unfolded. I assume I had it the night before because it had the smell of newness about it. My brother and I were swimming at my paternal grandparents cottage when we began to be bothered by fish with large teeth. These fish began to bite at us, there was a bit of a struggle, and…print it. That’s all there was.

The connection between reading the comic strip and the dream memory was so vivid that I have always considered it to be a premonitory dream of the future, only backwards, because a premonition warns you of future danger whereas this dream was a past danger forgotten until invoked by a future image.
Intuitions of the Future are a very interesting subset of cognitive events. There is much that is not-conscious that seems to act like fields of probability and potentiality, bearing no characteristics of consciousness but very much able to do so. Suddenly we find the right type of conscious behavior and what was only possible becomes visible to consciousness. It “pops into your head”, as it were.

In my dream, whatever state of potential existed put on the clothes of “sea snakes” and stepped into the street. However, I feel that that potentiality could easily have put on a different type of clothing if I had not read Doonesbury that morning. I had a mental state that had characteristics of conflict, fear, etc. Suddenly it had a face: the face of piranha.

Now what does this have to do with the Holy?
We have a great many people who believe the End of Times to be imminent. What does this mean to us? Millions in the past have had similar beliefs and those beliefs played out as wars, famine, disease, catastrophe, and eventually their individual deaths. The concept of Death is within us. The fact of Death is not. Yet it is believed and demonstrated that Prayer and Meditation seem to lead to Good Health.

So if the conceptual act of Praying affects the actual fact of Being-Healthy, then it seems obvious that the conceptual act of Death will affect the actual fact of Being-Dead. There is an old saying, “ Be careful what you pray for, for you may get it !” which points to this type of connect between mind and world.

In our society, there are at least two streams of thought; one ties together the mind and reality and believes the mind, remaining as mind – not being translated into physical activity- may affect reality. The other denies this, saying mental events such as desire to go for a ride must be translated into physical events (pick up keys, get into car, turn on engine) before mind affects reality. Most of us assert publicly the second view while affirming the limited application of the first view as well in the privacy of the secret garden of our own thoughts.

If the mind affects reality, the mere act of believing in the End of Times may hasten its approach. HOWEVER, the actuality of the End of Times need not be as you imagined it. There may be a link between mind and reality, but there is no NECESSARY link between your mind and reality. For example, a pandemic of the Avian Flu would seem to pretty much fill the bill for an End of Times for a hundred million people or so. Thus we would see that the intuitions of a future End of Times were correct in general, failing only in the catastrophic details.

At this point, I will end today. This discussion will form one of the bases of the more complete discussion of what this blog was set up to do: discuss the relationship of mankind to the Holy. A great deal of our mental life in relation to the Holy uses the Future Tense.