Redemption and Messianic Return

Some musings on the mythological future

Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish critic and philosopher who died while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940. His subtle, numinous essays make him a unique thinker of the 20th Century, impossible to categorize. He is one of my intellectual heroes; I recall a few of his insights or aphorisms nearly every day. In his writing, he left many puzzle pieces and crystalline shards to help us reflect on the secret workings of our world. 

Writing between World War One and Two, Benjamin foresaw humanity racing toward yet another catastrophic catharsis. He noted that humans possessed an innate need to "commingle" with the “cosmic forces”. If we don't find avenues for enacting this creatively and productively, through shared ritual and ceremony, it eventually happens destructively — convulsively — through wars and other mass disasters. While I was writing How Soon Is Now, I often thought of Benjamin’s idea. I wondered if humanity has subconsciously decided to ignore the ecological crisis until it spins out of control. Perhaps we seek an initiatory threshold as a species — a collective event that forces us to confront the raw cosmic powers that modern society, with its focus on material comforts, tries to suppress and subdue?

Benjamin pointed out the need for initiation as both a societal and individual process. Advocating for the value — even the necessity — of exploring altered states of consciousness, he wrote brilliant essays about his personal experiments with hashish and mescaline. These, he felt, revealed secret domains of psychic experience.

In his essay, “The Angel of History,” Benjamin explored the idea of an approaching messianic return or redemption. He wrote that each generation possesses a "weak messianic power," the latent potential for a collective transmutation of consciousness. When one generation doesn't fulfill this potential, they pass it onto the next, where it persists as humanity’s secret hope and inexpressible yearning. I felt that redemptive yearning when I visited Jerusalem; it seemed trapped, vibrating in each ancient stone. 

Benjamin wrote that this messianic return would be expressed, finally, as a change in our relationship to time. We might call this a movement from time as perpetual postponement to time as immanence. We would shift in our consciousness from feeling trapped in a linear, progressive, historical time conceived as an unvarying extension to realizing many other dimensions of time — mythological, synchronic, and archaic time, as well as, in the philosopher Jean Gebser's phrase, the "ever present origin." Psychedelics give us immediate access to these other time-realizations, in particular the sense of time as completion — as an extravagant masterpiece of artistry, where “all time is present now” and every moment is perfect in its holistic integrity. 

As I explored in books such as 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and How Soon Is Now, I tend to agree with 20th Century thinkers like Benjamin and Carl Jung who see, underlying the progression of historical events, an archetypal unfolding taking place within the collective Psyche. As a species, we seem to be driving toward something — some inescapable culmination or collective realization. Our momentum keeps accelerating. This can be quite difficult, even overwhelming, to contemplate. 

I find it fascinating to watch the different forces that seem to be working, whether in dialectical opposition or collusion, toward whatever this end point may be. For instance, the engineers of Silicon Valley, gripped by their own quasi-religious faith in mechanization, believe we are heading for a technological Singularity where we fuse with our machines. Our transhuman destiny is to become part of the apparatus of a synthetic Artificial Intelligence that may have purposes totally different from our own. This supreme machine-mind might choose to keep us in zoos, or annex us without compunction. 

Christian Fundamentalists in the US, on the other hand, believe we are now in the time of Revelation and Apocalypse. They await the second coming of Jesus Christ. This messianic redemption will come in the form of an individual leader, while historical events proceed exactly as the literal text of Revelation of John proclaims. The faithful in Islam similarly anticipate the imminent coming of the Mahdi, “The Rightly Guided One,” a leader who will unite humanity in the last years before the End of Time and the completion of Allah's will.

Everyone seems to be pushing toward their own version of the ascension or redemption or dimensional shift, or whatever we might call it. 

One of my pet hypotheses is that the evolution of human consciousness and civilization is, on another scale, also a kind of natural process, much like the development and birth of a fetus or the blossoming of a flower. There are certain things that must occur as part of the sequence, at particularly timed intervals — just as signals are transmitted from mother to developing baby in the womb at specific junctures, telling the fetus to start moving its limbs, organizing coherence in the developing brain, and so on. Similarly, we have seen roads, satellites, and the Internet developing rapidly, meshing humanity together as one “global brain” or “Noosphere.”

Could the Coronavirus itself be one of these signals? I don’t see why not. While it was impossible to imagine before it happened, now that it is here, there seems to be a certain inevitability about it. It is forcing numerous transformations in human society and preparing us for the next future shocks. Various forces are using the pandemic to advance their own agendas — including the financial elite who flock to Davos for the World Economic Forum every year. This faction now promotes “The Great Reset,” a shift to a managed technocratic society that serves their interests by eliminating meaningful Democratic participation. 

In another essay, unpublished during his lifetime, Benjamin mused that Capitalism itself was a “religion of destruction.” While it promulgates an atheist ethos backed by the scientific materialist worldview, Capitalism, Benjamin argues, is actually an agonized cry against a universe devoid of meaning or transcendence. By accelerating the destruction of the Earth through industrialization and consumerism, Capitalism is secretly a religious movement. It seeks to force the banished God to return, at the last possible moment, and reveal Him / Herself in His / Her Creation. 

I resonate with Benjamin’s excavation of this mythological structure underlying our profane and secular world: This yearning for redemption, this secret messianic impulse passed across generations, embedded in our economic system and technological drive toward dominance.

Without acknowledging it, we sense we have our roles as part of a Mystery Play: We await the Great Reveal — that moment when the masks are pulled away and God shows us His / Her face. 

A deeply esoteric perspective that was once very distant and almost impossible to grasp seems to become more accessible to us with each passing year: As observers and witnesses, “we” — each of us individually; all of us collectively — are God or Brahma. We are that pure Consciousness, immortal and eternal, that “one without a second,” shattering itself into multitudinous individuated fragments of consciousness to explore its creativity, its capacity to love and feel, to choose an infinite number of pathways back toward unity or away toward fragmentation and disintegration. 

From our individual, ego-based subjectivity, we believe we have free will. But as ancient Indian sacred texts like the Ashtavakra Gita tell us emphatically, this is an illusion. We are not “doing” anything. It is all just happening: “Since you have been bitten by the black snake of the self-opinion that 'I am the doer', drink the nectar of faith in the fact that 'I am not the doer', and be happy.”

It is conceivable that humanity is on the verge of bringing about our extinction as a physical species. Our self-annihilation could occur on a much faster time-scale than we generally let ourselves imagine. Many of my friends who belong to the Extinction Rebellion movement, after researching the climate science in depth, believe these are, in all likelihood, the last days of mankind. Of course, the time before extinction could be marked by decades or perhaps even centuries of collapse as our ecosystems sputter out and cease to function. We really don’t know the timescale at this point. 

Along with our nuclear and biological weapons, the biggest red flag is the potential release of vast stores of Methane, frozen under the thawing Siberian permafrost, that could push temperatures 3 or 4 degrees celsius warmer within a decade or two. So far, even dire predictions of the rate of change have fallen behind the actuality of what’s happening. The collapse of the world’s insect population over the last decades is another canary in the coal mine. We have unleashed vast processes of destruction that we simply don’t understand. 

I brood over these ideas constantly. I have had many significant paranormal, psychic and shamanic experiences. Such episodes reveal that the nature of reality is far more permeable and malleable than we allow for. Extraordinary events that seem to violate natural “laws” do indeed occur. Such events reveal an underlying or implicate order, another set of principles that we don’t comprehend, as of yet. The occult has its own ethic and aesthetic. Increasingly, I feel this is the direction we must investigate. It is an area I intend to explore in future newsletters. 

It doesn’t seem to me that our global civilization would have reached this present level of complexity for nothing. From an evolutionary viewpoint, that would seem tragically wasteful and, spiritually, a kind of cruel joke. On the other hand, perhaps our civilization and species are no different than the elaborate pattern of a Tibetan sand mandala which gets thrown to the wind after its design is complete. Another lineage from Tibetan Buddhism is called Chöd. Chöd practicioners perform meditations in charnel grounds and graveyards. They envision offering their body to be devoured by demons and deities as a way of dissolving the ego. It almost feels like we chose to participate in a collective, global Chöd ceremony, just by being born into this time. 

I am still fascinated by many of the same ideas and themes that I explored fifteen years ago, in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Could we enter a new dimension of reality when enough people undergo a certain level of initiation? Does something shift when a vanguard of people has awakened to validate paranormal experience, synchronicity, and the “Reality of the Psyche” to the point where we can accept these as givens? From that foundation, could we collectively access hidden powers and invisible dimensions of being. Could we then apply these powers as new technologies for healing our world? Could this present generation on Earth be the one that accesses humanity’s latent messianic yearning, plugging into it as a psycho-electric current for collective transformation? I don’t know. But even at this late date, I remain curious and hopeful. 

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I just published a new book, Conspiranoia, as an E Book on Amazon (Currently “Number One New Release in Political Philosophy”). Buy it here.

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