We have now reached a time for a great and growing inner sense of celebration, to mark the passing of an era. Not just the calendrical millennium. For, we are in the last days of the Science-Fiction Age – the twentieth century, a time of bizarrity in extremis. There is currently a downward-pulling feeling of potential doom, of consequences, approaching difficulty, apocalypse and penance. If it is not felt consciously, it is felt unconsciously, demonstrated in the perpetual reassertion of 'normality', the incantation of the mantra of 'a temporary downturn', business-as-usual syndrome. Nothing is fundamentally amiss with our world – so we are to believe.

Crisis has a characteristic set of psychological symptoms: a vast heap of problems all around, piling up faster than they can be cleared; issues and problems which mutually interlock with all others such that it is difficult to identify where to start; a stuck situation which could go on forever; a sense that there is no way through; a sense that we are atomised, all alone with our problems; a feeling of a dark and drudgerous future, and a sense that things will not really change. These symptoms apply in cases of personal depression, but they also pervade group and global dimensions – the global crisis is everybody's personal crisis, and personal crises are integral to the global crisis. These are symptoms of the immediate prelude to quantum change.

'Apocalypse'. It's widely misunderstood. The Greek apokalypsis means revelation – not catastrophe. Revelation is catastrophe only for a rigid, fearful ego – or for the group ego, 'civilisation' – which strives to protect itself, believing it might die. It expends ever-greater amounts of energy propping up its self-defined reality, engaging in increasingly expensive strategies. Today, we modern, urbane people have become highly programmable, after millennia of preparation. Even in enlightened circles, there are those who take it upon themselves to protect the minds of others from seeing – sometimes in subtle guises. For most, it is safer to follow the given program than to strike out into unknown territory.

'Brain police', self-appointed minders of perceived reality, suffer fear of losing control, of truly taking their own authority, assuming responsibility and, literally, of becoming happy. We all have this in us, and we need to lose it: it only strengthens the causes of destruction. This disposition makes us unconscious channellers, obeying programs implanted in us through our upbringing, through fear, through unconscious memories of our soul-past, through our genetic race-memory. One such program is the belief that our thoughts have no relation to what happens to us. Another is that we are unrelated individuals treading our own isolated paths. Or that 'I am not good enough...', 'I don't deserve...' or 'In order to achieve, I have to fight'. This channelling ability is very well embedded.

As a race of beings endowed with free will, we have, throughout history, repeatedly been tempted with what looks like a short-cut to salvation. In order to get his way, someone, somewhere, first hit another person with a stick. This looked like an effective way of achieving things, so it was done again. And again. And the perpetrators built up a feeling that it was alright to do this: it made their egos feel substantial. Weapons became a solution, when in fact they were a problem, and still are.

Onlookers to these early 'sins' acquired a feeling of error and regret because they did not stop this tendency: everyone started feeling underlyingly guilty, accruing disrespect for themselves. And because they didn't stop what was unfolding, even when they felt guilty, they re-edited reality in order to begin to feel alright about guilt, to think of it as normal or non-existent. They built mythologies around it, regularising it: 'I didn't do it, it wasn't me'.

This has escalated nowadays to tremendous proportions. It was embodied in the Reagan-Thatcher syndrome of the 1980s, where it became possible for public figures and persuaders to wear an air of complete non-complicity, hiding behind a disguise of reform and freedom, to create a story looking overwhelmingly foolproof, and to position themselves on the moral high ground, while nevertheless perpetrating crimes against humanity. Spin-doctors, business titans, experts and image-creators all joined in, pumping it out, reinforcing the old paradigm by giving it new glitzy clothing. "Get rich quick, and don't worry yourself over others..."

This is all a sign of approaching change. The spinning of a Great Illusion evolved over millennia of history, to cover layer upon layer of collective guilt-tracks, has to reach a point where image so seriously overrides reality that apokalypsis, revelation, may properly occur. We have known since the 1960s that our civilisation is in danger, and yet the program we have been running since that time turns away from this knowing, ignores uncomfortable evidence and pretends that, if there truly is a problem, it will be overcome by the usual means – money, science, hi-tech, insurance, armies, summits, PR campaigns and products. Let's have another drink. We all do it! These are symptoms of a system going crazy, investing ever greater resources and energy in maintaining the status quo. Yet civilisations, like individuals, need a guiding, empowering vision, and without one, they're like a ship without a captain, heading inevitably for the rocks.

A mainstream idea nowadays fed to the public is that there is nothing much fundamentally new to discover – the 'end of history' – and from now on, its just a question of extending our domain of influence. The contrasting idea is that we plummet tragically toward disaster, and it's already too late. And another idea arising out of the latter is that we all, or some of us, will be miraculously saved, whether by technology, summitry, archangels or sheer luck. All of these three ideas arise particularly from belief-choices Europeans made in medieval times. All of them are perfectly valid, within the paradigm they are part of. Though they depend on the perpetuation of that paradigm in order to work. But they are probably not the way things will unfold. They only look that way, from where we now stand, unknowing of our future.

The elevation of consciousness, the conversion of planet Earth into a light-space vehicle, is likely to be a far more mundane process than many see – and yet, the mundane is likely to become cosmic, to manifest apparently new laws. The miracles we shall see are likely to be performed by us, acting in new ways, forced on us by pressure of circumstance and arising through the application of a little genuine intelligence. Even our collective ideals, blueprints and grand designs are obsolete – the death of Marxism and the slow, painful decline of religion are symptoms of that. For the next 70-100 years, we're driving by the seat of our collective pants. The answers are likely to arise from simply trying hard to evolve them as we go along. Yet miracles are likely to be plenty – we need them, because our accustomed 'rational' route is not yielding solutions. And the precondition for a miracle is an absolutely impossibly blocked situation.

The Great Revelation has already begun, but it is historical in dimension – and history unfolds in spans larger than our lifetimes. Its last bursts were 1965-68 (a dispensation and empowerment, in seed form) and 1988-89 (the first of many forced adjustments to reality, and a mass eruption of the collective unconscious). Now, in the 1990s and at the Millennium, we are entering another one, pragmatically driven – a new beginning, a refocusing on the social and international structures which regulate the macro-level of world change – money, markets, law, governance. Astrologically, this was set in motion by the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993 (with its pre-wave in 1989). Such a conjunction occurs every 170ish years, but this one comes at a crucial time in humanity's history.

Revelation is here not because of overtly spiritual reasons: it has an economic, ecological and social basis. Yet underlying spiritual forces are driving from behind and beneath – a growing sense that what we have is inadequate to what we are. We are living through a global shift for which Soviet perestroika was a practice run – probably down to sequences and details. It concerns evolving new systems which can handle the energy-rush already coming upon us – still, as I write, largely dammed up, but so close to the top of the dam. Mere presidents won't be able to resolve this one.

Things are not what we have been told they are. We have known this for a long time and have avoided seeing it. This revelation comes in the form of scandals, revelatory crises, outbreaks of public outrage or compassion – symptoms of a rising awareness of deeper, truer values than those we have lived by for long. Even if truth is denied, truth creeps closer to the surface. It's a bad time for even safe-seated leaders, for even the soundest knowns, for even the most stable institutions. The reality-shift is permeating everything, from personal and local lives to global macro-concerns, from the ozone layer to deep underground, from the privileged and powerful to the poor and helpless.

Although the current, unstable, mainstream consensus is that everything is under control and basically normal, and although everyone is geared up to behave according to this belief, the authorities and power- holders of our world are at an impasse. The price of corruption, contamination and convention is getting, and becoming seen to be, too high. Too much is becoming visible. People are seeing more clearly, making their own assessments, with more emotion.

Yet, people keep things the same because we have little sense of what comes next – except what looks like decline, difficult change, threat and chaos. This is one of those programmed ideas. Even in today's movement for transformation, the tendency is to think of 'letting go of the past' rather than 'embodying the future'. Yet, the big shock is this: despite the mighty hurdles we now seem to have to cross – disruption, detoxification, migration, climate-change, potential ungovernability, mass movements or extreme moral degeneration – the future will probably actually turn out to be easier. To expand on that: infinitely easier. Easy in the sense that things are likely to burst into movement, finding simple, appropriate solutions. Change, though it has many difficulties, can be easier than maintaining a status quo. And people might well discover more simplicity and love than they ever knew was possible.

Someone once asked me where the most spiritual place in Europe was. This was something of a silly question, but I answered that it was probably Sarajevo (this was during the Bosnian civil war). Why? Because people in Sarajevo were facing death and change every day, and as a result, they had lost all preconceptions to focus on survival and cooperation – the result being many unchronicled acts of kindness and sharing, of mutual relief under difficult circumstances. Compare this with the frozen dysfunctionality pervading a modern, secure housing estate, and Sarajevo indeed would look as if it were filled with the Holy Spirit. There is some parallel between this and the future – though the causes might be different. The future can become easier because we'll cease expending energy on waste, over-production, neurosis, repression, unnecessary death or debilitation, negative, hopeless attitudes, living at a level far less than our full potential, stress in society and nature, expenditure on armies, wasted aid, choking traffic jams, rampant crime, Tinseltown diversions of reality, institutionalised lies, isolated individualism, cramping fear and piles of empty coke cans.

Apokalypsis: a waking-up after a long, intricate, painful and pointless dream. During the twentieth century we have seen all manner of suffering – not only that of victims and losers, but also that of masters and winners. We have seen levels of bizarrity, contradiction, tragedy and insanity unequalled in human history – even though our history is pockmarked with all of these. Our civilisation, now global, has lost its guiding vision – the guiding vision relied on unsustainable arrangements now dying, on the logic of a bad dream which relied on unseeing. It ran on a trajectory of self-destruction which didn't matter until today, when total destruction has come very close.

However, what is revealed in the Great Revelation is that the big picture, the guiding vision, for today is already changed. The big picture is one in which cooperation, global interdependence, community, sanity, happiness and reconciliation prevail, overall. This is the paradigm we have not yet applied to human history. It's probably the only possibility left. It is a totality in which all the worldly realities we are faced with are still there, but we see them all very differently. It will bring new challenges, but these are challenges of movement, not of stuckness.

What was a problem becomes an opportunity. Waste dumps become the goldmines of the future. What was a hurt becomes a gift of healing – people war-torn forgive one another out of sheer exhaustion. What was toxic becomes a catalyst for new synthesis – the real industrial revolution is likely to come with responsible technology-use. 'Reformed' people, who have been to hell and back, are more gifted, experienced, pragmatic, committed and flexible than those who have lived a life of comfortable moderation. The whole human race has become destructive or criminal, whether actively or passively, and the whole human race is heading for a breakthrough. It's a vast, multi-level energy-saving possibility. Like a war-effort without a war, with everyone engaged in it. Unemployment is an impossibility: there is too much to do. It involves building the preconditions for the integration of Heaven and Earth: realigning Earth to the ways of Heaven, of Nature and the underlying intelligence which pervades all things.

There will be plenty of difficulties. All of us will have to accommodate greatly to new circumstances and people, in dramatically new ways. But the funny thing is that when we humans undertake a path of true experiential learning – starting with our arms twisted by circumstance yet freeing ourselves by making intelligent choices – the resultant energy-release, freed of self-limiting implants, affects things directly in the world around. Problems won't go away, but they will look different, and we will be in a better psychological position to grapple with them. The ingenuity, intelligence and insightfulness of humanity – especially of those who now are children, or are as yet unborn – is immense. Healing, when the commitment is truly made, can be rapid. For, like the physical body, humanity, when the blockages are removed, is self- correcting. When the soul shines through, after release, full human potential is available. And each indi vidual has inherent insight and untried skill tucked away, covered only by fear, guilt and self-limitation.

I am painting an optimistic picture. This is because seeing things this way, reality changes. We forget that good things can be easy. Doors start opening. The best way to find a solution is to be one, to cease being a part of the problem! Easier said than done: but it starts in what we believe. In our bones. If we visualise a century of reform and reconstruction in the world, an onward growth of increasing lightness, of resolution and coming-together, we shine a new light on our old beliefs. Apokalypsis. Revelation. And then revelation is made manifest in the way we act – that's the hard bit, but it's the bit which matters.

We are at risk, at present, of discovering that our old ideas are obsolete and ineffective – such as the idea that there is no direct relationship between belief and our reality. We are at risk of discovering that unity and cooperation are easy and expedient. From this viewpoint, we only believed things were impossible to change because we were in a historic dramatic prelude to the uncovering of vast new possibilities. This change is being catalysed by force of circumstance, and every event points the way to a solution.

If enough people steadily envision this, and act in the light of it, we activate a core program residing in the heart of the human race: this program sets out to help us evolve, joyfully realising our collective purpose and integrating as one collective mind, one being, one family. This is not all. This core program seeks to help us to complete our history, to bring it to its conclusion, in preparation for the next stage. It's too laborious to resist this inevitability too much longer. At least, that's what I've come to understand in my own corner of the woods!

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© Palden Jenkins, 1992. All of these articles are copyright. They may individually be copied and shared with others in a spirit of knowledge-sharing and fair play, but they may not be sold, printed or reproduced in quantity or changed in form without the permission of the copyright holder. Magazine and other editors may e-mail me for permission to reprint. E-mail: