Entering the Third Millennium Consciousness

by
Jeva Singh-Anand

© 2000

I would like to begin this sermon by briefly reveling in a moment of paranoiac doomsday nostalgia and recount my own experience of Y2K, that point in our not too distant history at which all computer clocks were to have been set back one hundred years and everyone fated to live by the Gregorian calendar was to be put on Santa�s "Naughty List". Chuckle, if you will. This is, after all, the Sunday before Halloween -- the silliest holiday after April 1st, that holiday which celebrates children and childishness with more vigor than Christmas. But keep in mind that technically the new Millennium does not begin until January 1, 2001. So who knows what Y2K+1 will bring us.

There we were -- my wife, my two year-old son and I -- halfway through the month of December, realizing that the Millennium was almost upon us. Would that confounded Y2K bug wreak global havoc, or would we sail through it with only minor scrapes and bruises? That "Post-Millennium" skit on Saturday Night Live where a hunger crazed Danny De Vito cooks up his own version of "Boston Clam Chowder" -- with White-Out and pencil erasers -- didn�t seem so funny as December 31, 1999, drew closer and closer. The skit was absurd, hindsight being 20-20, but somewhere in the back of my mind some rather disturbing images took place: of food riots, roving militias, nuclear meltdowns -- you get the idea.

Would Y2K catch us all with our pants down? Were we prepared? Had I done all I could to provide for and to protect my family? Apart from one canned peas, rice, and ramen noodle binge, I had done no panic shopping whatsoever. I had bought no 100 gal. water drums, no K-rations, no wood-alcohol generators, and no armor piercing amphibious rocket launchers. My wife said there were two thousand better uses for our hard earned money.

But what were we to use to fend off the roving Y2K militias? All I had was an old crowbar, a few rusty screw drivers, and some leftover turkey drumsticks.

These thoughts gave me indigestion on at least one or two occasions, although they didn�t exactly rob me of my sleep. I didn�t expect all of things to happen. Not here, anyway. But somewhere, something was bound to go wrong, making ripples powerful enough to be felt right here in Sioux City, IA.

I was sure of it!

New Year�s Eve arrived. I turned on the television set, ready to witness the end of the world on my living room couch, tortilla chips and salsa dip by my side. But no matter where the Millennium arrived, no catastrophes occurred anywhere. Even in countries where the government mainframes were of the ENIAC variety (that is, definitely not Y2K compatible), things were running smoothly.

I opened the door and took a look outside. The neighborhood was still standing. I took a drive, only to see people going about their business as if it were just a regular workday, not the end of the world.

Back at home in front of the television set, Y2K rolled through China, India, Russia, South Africa, and still no news of widespread disaster.

Was all the Y2K hype just a media trick, just like some conspiracy connoisseurs believe the moon landing was just a media hoax? Or were the media just trying to keep everyone calm while everywhere else in the world chaos really was breaking out.

Y2K hit Newfoundland, hit the rest of the East Coast, and still no footage of looters in the streets!

We went out for dinner before the end of the world would reach Central Time. Close to midnight, my wife and I watched the minutes, the seconds pass. 12:00 am, the witching hour, and the world was still standing.

The feared Y2K bug turned out to be a major non-event.

We should certainly be grateful for it.

What is our obsession with the end of the world? In retrospect, we can now laugh about all the Y2K hype. We may now deny it, but I think it would be safe to say that everyone in this church worried about what would happen when all those nines turned to zeroes at least once, at least a little.

As a culture, we have been steeped in Judeo-Christian thought for a very long time, and the Revelation of St. John promises us the end of the world. Placing it at the exact end of a thousand year cycle makes it, or course, more convenient for us to mark that date on our planners, although those of us who have read Biblical books other than Revelations know that the end of the world will in fact sneak up on us, will come like a thief in the night -- in all likelihood at a very inconvenient time. Ends of the world being rather inconvenient matters to ponder in general, I cannot really imagine that any time, no matter where one puts it -- and on whose calendar -- will be convenient.

We have been promised it, that Millennium, that end of the world, and we want delivery on that promise, although we also dread the outcome. It�s the stuff of great cinema. Giant meteors and hostile extraterrestrial intelligences lay waste to humanity in Technicolor and surround sound. In the end, only the philosopher kings survive. Only the noble spirits make it, while all evildoers perish. The Millennium, as it has been sold to the public, promises to cleanse and purify the human race. And the moviegoing public devours this pernicious ideology in such numbers that the faschists of yore would blanch with envy.

It is the stuff of great literature.

Those of us who had to read William Butler Yeats�s poem "The Gyres" in our Literature 101 College Classes (and its companion: "The Second Coming") can�t help but feel our neck hairs bristle when we elicit the poem�s meaning by deciphering its symbolism. As history gyrates out of control, the terrible, heathen Sphinx looks on as beauty and old values perish while "irrational streams of blood (5)" stain the earth. The relief to this suffering promised in the poem�s second and third stanzas is paltry. We are exhorted to "heave no sigh, let no tear drop (11)" over "a greater, a more gracious time (12)". We are promised that the world will be reborn out of some "rich dark, nothing (22)" -- only to be thrown into "that unfashionable gyre again." In short, the poem appears to be yet another Millennialist rant, viewed in the light of something akin to Humphrey Bogart�s famous admonition to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, that in the grand scheme of things, the lives of three (or three billion) people amount to a hill o f beans. No wonder that graduate students everywhere are pushing so hard to banish the �dead white men� from the literary canon, that body of literature English professors deem worthwhile reading.

Students of Western Esotericism are not so plagued. That is not because Western Esotericism is a morbid philosophy. However, when viewed in the context of Western Esotericism, the poem�s meaning changes. And Yeats was deeply involved in the study of this body of thought and the practice of Magick. At one time, he was even chief of the fabled Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Aleister Crowley, a crabby genius who locked horns with him on more than one occasion, treated him mercilessly in his novel Moonchild, by portraying him as a bumbling magician and a mediocre poet -- but as a gifted painter of watercolors (xxx).

The passing of one era, or Aeon, is indeed chaotic, even traumatic, be it in the material world or the spiritual. But the knowledge, the understanding that it is the natural course of events may help us to look on and, as Yeats recommends "laugh in tragic joy (8)". Such insights are, of course, not limited to Western Esotericism. We find them in places as distant as India, where the birth and collapse of entire universes appears to the considered a rather commonplace occurrence. We find them in our own history, when our own culture clashes with the cultures of the indigenous peoples of this continent. Facing the end of the era in which Native man "once moved over his broad land or lived in happy homes, protected by the Great Spirit" (1771), the Suquamish chief Seattle observed in his famous speech, "But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature (1771)."

Yeats believed that history moves in cycles, some 2000 years in length. These cycles, also called Aeons, coincide with the solar system�s movement along the Zodiac. The birth of Christ initiated the Age of Pisces, and as this Age draws to a close, we anticipate the Age of Aquarius.

While some believe that the New Aeon, the Age of Aquarius is yet to arrive, there are some who contend that the end of the old Aeon of Osiris, the Dying God, already occurred nearly a hundred years ago, in 1904, when the world was destroyed by fire. According to these thinkers we have now entered the Aeon of Horus, the Divine Child. Ask your great-grandparents to tell you about the terrible firestorm of 1904. Don�t bother. There was no such thing. This point of view is particularly interesting, though, not only inasmuch as it exhorts us to quit worrying about the end of the world already and begin rebuilding it. But it also challenges us to review our understanding of the words �fire� and �world�. Exactly what world was destroyed by what kind of fire?

Things thought too long can be no longer thought
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth (2-3)

When science was finally able to overthrow the dogma of the established religions, a host of opportunities for the advancement of humankind arose. But many chances that were thus created were also squandered. One dogma, that of the infallibility of the churches, was replaced by another, that the universe is only a collection of agitated matter, that life is an accident, that consciousness is determined by consensus, and that deviation from the consensus is illness. Dogma continues to assert itself. But it is increasingly challenged and weakened by inquiry. And by the imagination.

As a society, we have grown to accept only as truth what we can perceive with our five senses. And we have become so cynical that we dismiss anything we perceive as mental illness, if what we so perceive lies outside that which we have been permitted to perceive. We can no longer understand the universe as anything other than dead matter. We can no longer understand human existence as headed for anything other than entropy, dissolution. Our paradigms have become worse than atheistic; they have become nihilistic.

Yeats�s poetry can only be fully understood by minds who can accept that the Universe exists primarily on planes of existence far more subtle than the material.

In Magick in Theory and Practice, our crabby genius Aleister Crowley wrote the following about the cynicism with which the founders of the Great Religions are treated by this nihilsm,
"Modern thought, rejecting ... miracles, has adopted theories of epilepsy and madness. As if organization could spring from disorganization! Even if epilepsy were the cause of these great movements [Christianity, Islam, Buddhism] which have caused civilization after civilization to arise from barbarism, it would merely be an argument for cultivating epilepsy." (5)

Another crabby genius, Dostoyevski�s Underground Man, bitterly mocked the ambitions of the dross nihilism that still pervades our thinking:
"All that is needed is to discover the laws of nature; then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and life will become exceedingly easy. All human actions will, of course, be classified according to these laws -- mathematically, like a logarithm table up to 108,000 -- and entered in a special almanac. Or, still better, certain edifying volumes will be published, similar to our encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be calculated and designated with such precision that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in our world." (27)

The divine, the truly spiritual is by definition outside the reach of the strictly intellectual, prosaic rationality. Our society which sacrifices the masses at the altar of the cult of reason no longer permits that to exist which lies outside its bounds. Fundamentalism, in its Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and atheistic guises, fills the void thus left in the spirits of human beings, poisoning their minds and hearts. There is no fundamentalist Christianity -- only Christian Fundamentalism. All kinds of Fundamentalism are in essence the same doctrine, and Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. are merely modifying adjectives, different flavors of Fundamentalism, if you will. Because every kind of Fundamentalism, without exception, seeks to divide humanity into irreconcilable factions, eternally at each others� throats. Perhaps this is why God entrusts His wisdom only to madmen and poets.

It is that toxic prosaicism, not science and reason per se, that Crowley and Dostoyevski so vehemently decried. It is the arrogance of those who lack the capacity, the will for vision: their unwillingness to shed their blinders.

How then shall this new Millennium be different? We have already tried fighting the �war to end all wars�, tried it more than once. Each time the world has been left a more turbulent and bitter place. The assertion of some New Age personalities, that the atrocities committed in the last hundred years or so are some spiritual purification after which there will be a thousand years of peace and harmony runs counter to what we know about human nature. The experience of suffering violence at the hand of another person does not teach us that we should shun violence. The opposite is usually the case. That is why vengeance is such a universal emotion.

Love is agreeably a much kinder approach, but just how much more effective has it been? Macchiavelli keenly observed that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. Beginning teachers are told not to smile in the classroom until after Christmas. And what of all those heroes who were martyred in the name of love? Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Arnulfo Romero, and all the others. Their lives are indeed exemplary and they were able to achieve remarkable things during their lifetimes. But their achievements only outlived them to a certain extent. India continues to be a hotbed of ethnic violence. Self-styled conservatives brand King a philanderer and busily chip away at the hard-won achievements of the civil rights movements. The Holocaust against the indigenous people of El Salvador continued long after Archbishop Romero was shot to death in his own church. Love without power, without will is useless.

Stuck in the old paradigms, a world view in which antagonistic forces are at conflict with one another, the New Millennium threatens to be merely another bad Y2K joke, and Yeats�s poem will become prophecy, indeed. All things shall run "on that unfashionable gyre again." It doesn�t matter what we call these forces: Mars and Venus, love and war, science and religion, right brain and left brain.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a French aviator and novelist wrote:
"As the inheritor of God, my civilization made men equal in Man.
I understand the origin of the respect of men for one another.
The scientist owed respect to the stoker, for what he respected in the stoker was God;
and the stoker, no less than the scientist, was an ambassador of God." 423-4

Aleister Crowley, in The Book of Law, revealed to him in a vision, put it more simply, "Every man and woman is a star (1.3)"

A New Millennium may be indeed upon us, and a glorious one it may become, indeed. But we have to allow it to happen. It will not come about through violence, and it will not come about through love. It will come about through acts of cognition. Through acts of imagination. Through acts of faith. Through acts of vision.

Let the old paradigms collapse. Let the old world, the old Aeon and all of its outdated prejudices die. Let fire consume it all! Let the universe tumble about our ears like a house of cards, as Crowley put it, keeping in mind that "this ruin is like the opening of the Gates of Heaven (31)."