Friday, July 25, 2008

Q: WHEN IS THE END OF TIMES COMING ?

This is a great question and if one is to believe all that has been written about End of Times, it is coming yesterday, today and tomorrow. Some of our most illustrious theologians were telling us that the year 2000 was "The End". But they were wrong, it wasn't. Many used this prediction to write books about salvation, sin, damnation, lakes of fire and one of my favorites "hellfire".
Some of our most revered religious icons of every ilk have offered up such pearls of knowledge as: Aids was punishment for gay people's activities. That the voice of God spoke to him and said that if he didn't receive a lot of money for his college, God was going to kill him. That the purple Telletubby cartoon character was a secret Gay plot to influence our children. Of course the favorite of most has been the idea that the end of the world is near. Some of these religious fanatics gleefully anticipate the world destruction that is predicted so we can finally be absorbed into a sublime spiritual nothingness.
Who could not lay awake nights worrying that the end of the world was coming, but somehow you might be better off if you bought their book or gave to their church. Never mind that these charlatans were driving Bentley's, living in splendor, getting caught in brothels with ladies of the night, whose morals were surely more righteous than theirs. These supposedly religious Johns, carriers of our faith, were violating the principle they ranted to their followers to live by and some wonder why people are leaving organized religion by the droves.
This is not meant to be a rant against religion, but to show that if you believe the Telletubbi story, you will undoubtedly believe the End of Times legend too. What I say here will be hard for some to accept, and I will not be able to prove what I say any more than they can prove that the End of the World will come in the year 2000.
The truth is, the world can NEVER end. There was a time, so ancient that even God would be hard pressed to remember the first emergence of awareness that eventually brought forth in physical fact that which had always existed in the inner mind of All That Is. It is only in our limited physical perspective that we cannot grasp a reality where there is no beginning and no end. That which has always existed in Prime Reality, had no beginning and Always has been, therefore it can never end. Words are symbols of something else, and beginnings and endings are meaningless except in our material world.
Our perception of the World, the Universe and all of it's parts, the planets, the galaxies, the nebulae, the radio stars and the space in between that we so endearingly call the Heavens, are massive energy manifested into perceptual patterns that we interpret in our own way through the use of our physical senses. Our senses project themselves outward into space through the use of physical instruments to interpret these vast available energy patterns in a way that brings them into a physical a focus that is loosely accepted by everyone who is physical in our system of reality. Where you see planets you are perceiving more dense "manifest" energy pattern. Where you see nothing you are seeing less dense "unmanifest" energy pattern. Every hypothetical point in the Universe is aware with it's own kind of consciousness. There is no EMPTY point in space.
These energy manifestations, the planets, etc., are pure energy expressed as physical mass, material particles, electrons, protons, neutrons and atoms, gathering others of like expression around themselves to form Everything That Is. Einstein knew before most that energy and mass are one and neither can be destroyed, only change their form. In other words, conscious awareized energy at some ancient time was driven into Universal and Planetary form, including the Earth and it can never be destroyed. If you could perceive the world or the universe through a cat or dog's eyes, you would wonder if we were on the same planet observing the same universe.
Even our scientists know that the earth is surely not solid, neither is the chair you are sitting on at this time, but like any atom or conglomeration of atoms that group together to form significances to our perceptions, they seem solid and as we know they serve the purpose of supporting our "not solid" bodies well enough for practical purposes.
Energy cannot be destroyed, the Earth cannot be destroyed, but it can be rendered unlivable by those who inhabit it. (Us!) There are those who think that a caring God would never allow his people to perish in such a way. "All That Is" would not interfere with our actions but we could, through our own lack of foresight, ruin the quality of life on our planet to the point where the necessary elements were damaged in such a way as to make life unlivable and unsustainable. When this platform for experience that we so affectionately call Earth suffers such damage to make a quality life as we know it unattainable, two things can happen.
We could mutate to adapt to new conditions that we would have before been unable to tolerate in our past physical form, or the Earth could be re-organized, re-set, to something similar to it's original form that can once again support life that we are familiar with. This, of course would mean a new beginning, and is not entirely out of the question. It has happened before and could happen again.
God will never bring about the end of anything ! God (All That Is) thrives and grows exponentially on creativity, experience, joyful expression and love of life itself, and Can Not bring an end to consciousness in whatever form since in greater terms, He would then be destroying a part of Himself. ( I am using the male pronoun, but the term God is not gender specific and could just as well be She or It).
By inference I am asserting that you carry within the deepest recesses of your being the ancient memory of your connection with that Prime Being. God would no more destroy a part of itself than an angry parent would destroy their own children. God is creative, not destructive. God is not an angry, vengeful, destructive God, but a loving presence in all living beings from the grandest to the least and even a spider can rest assured of it's sanctity and safety.
If there is any destruction it will be visited on ourselves by ourselves, not by God !
We have the power to create constructively, all we need to do is realize it and execute responsibly.
Unfortunately that is not a quality that we have adopted yet.
But we will !