Apocalypse Soon: The Last Two Horsemen Are Galloping

Hegel recognized it.

And one of the things he said is that history is actually at an end because the soul is exhausted. It didn’t mean that Hegel thought after Napoleon, who was then in charge of European politics, was the end of the world and the apocalypse, but he recognized that there could not be any further growth or development, that there was a decline and a contraction. And he was, I think, the high point of the first time that nonduality was fully realized in Western philosophy, at least since Plato or the classical Neoplatonic writers who were incorporated into Christian mysticism—but he is a nondualist. But his nonduality is different from the nonduality of Buddhism or Advaita, because he certainly achieved the neti neti, which is what the dialectic is: it’s thesis and negation, negation of the ego, and then negation of the negation, which is negation of the soul, by realizing the Absolute. But what he understands is that the world itself is inherently paradoxical, and that paradox shows up to the ego-mind as self-contradiction.

And so it’s only the ability to deal with contradiction that enables you to unify what otherwise to the ego-mind cannot make sense. So when the Buddhists say “Nirvana is samsara”, how can that make sense? How does the ego make sense of that? Or “transcendence is immanence” or “death is life”. Yes, we are dead and alive simultaneously at this moment, because the ego is dead to the soul, and you only know the soul by going through ego death. And it’s only when the ego is realized as being already dead because it’s just a program. It never had any life, that’s its lack—it lacks being, lacks essence—when you realize you’re already dead because you’ve never been born, but that death is deathlessness.

And then you realize the Absolute Self by recognizing that both sides of this contradiction actually make a whole, that is a unified truth that is no longer contradictory, but only when you realize you are simultaneously alive and dead, and then realize you are beyond both, and then can integrate the two and live in that state in which the integration and the unification of these opposites has been achieved—truthfully, really, absolutely—in the way you live in the state of security, and freedom from anxiety—that is the proof of it. And the capacity to live spontaneously without inhibition, but also without exhibition. It’s that absoluteness that has united those opposites, and has united the opposites of fear and desire, and gone beyond both.

So Hegel has achieved that philosophically and understood it, and teaches the mind how to gain nonduality. So for that reason, and Heidegger who already goes back into—he loses belief in the Absolute Spirit—he’s an atheist and a nihilist, really, but he recognizes that this is where the world is in a state of fallenness. And he uses the word “thrownness”, in Being and Time, we’re thrown into this situation, we’re shipwrecked here, we find ourselves in a world that we didn’t make and that we’re victims of the situation. But we’re also guilty, because somehow we’re responsible, and we know that we lack something important. And so we go with a sense of existential guilt into the world, and have to then live an inauthentic existence to hide that fact, and to try to fill the lack from the validation of others. And that keeps us in a state of weakness, and in a state of false consciousness.

So Heidegger, I think, gives a very brilliant analysis of the ego as it is today; the postmodern ego, in fact, and of the evil of technology, because he also foresaw back in, well, by the end of World War II, when he was a political prisoner himself, which is when he read the Dao De Jing, and became a Daoist, and he became very spiritual—he recognized that technology was going to be used to enslave the human race and destroy it, that he said, his final words were “Only a God can save us.” And so we must find that God within ourselves. Not just a god—the God.

But as Oppenheimer, the physicist, said, when he saw the first explosion of the nuclear bomb in the Manhattan Project, which was a project created by supposedly “former” Nazi scientists who came to the US and created atomic bombs and missiles—Wernher von Braun, and others from Germany—he said, “I am become death.” He quoted the Bhagavad Gita, which is indeed the vision of God as death. Mahakal. Shiva, the destroyer of worlds. And it is, Hegel realized when the truth of the nihilism of the human spirit that had already happened in the 1700s. He was born in 1770, lived to about 1830, and it was already in that period that he was speaking about the death of God in terms of the loss of connection to Spirit in human consciousness. Nietzsche picked that up and said, “Haven’t you heard that God is dead?” But it came from Hegel. But what Hegel meant was God will, now, God has now changed because we don’t pray to a God that’s transcendent any longer, at least most people don’t. And it’s ridiculed by the scientism, consumerism, materialism, etc., of the mainstream. And even Christians mostly give lip service to it (and Jews and Muslims), that God has become death. And God can only appear as mass death. So although it seems evil to the ego, it is only the reflection of the ego’s own evil rejection of God that forces God to come back as death. That brings us back to the truth of our eternal life, our eternal light that transcends the world.

And so we have chosen to go through this cleansing at the end of time. We’re not victims of an evil cabal creating an apocalyptic takeover of the human race. No, it is a self-chosen collective decision to activate the Lower Death Drive and bring this about. But also the Upper Death Drive is activated, and those who wish to achieve God must go through death voluntarily. Not death of the body, but death of the ego, to realize God as the “Great Death”, the “Death of Death”. And that is liberation.

Audio File: Apocalypse Soon: The Last Two Horsemen Are Galloping – Audio File.mp3