The Day After Judgement Day
22 May 2011
YESTERDAY, 21 MAY 2011, was the Christian Judgement Day, according to Preacher, Harold Camping. This is the day when the chosen few were selected out and brought up to heaven, leaving the rest of us to a hellish existence on Earth until 21 Oct 2011 when God then destroys the Earth, again according to Harold Camping.
Well, I am here so I was not selected, which is not surprising as I am not a Christian expecting Jesus to save me (although I love Jesus as one of my spiritual teachers). I wonder if Harold Camping and his supporters are still here… or have they been whisked away. I hope they are happy wherever they are.
It is easy to joke on matters like this, and to deride prophets like Camping who stick their necks on the line with end-of-world predictions, but making absolute commitments to events in time-space is something we all actually do. Most of us make those commitments to events in our past, which are just as imaginary as Camping's Judgement Day commitments. And we spend much of our lives trying to convince others and ourselves of those events.
You can think of these imagined events as a string of assumptions stretching from past to future, like beads on a string, representing the story of our lives. And we are so committed to that story that we will proclaim to the world the truth of these events. But the question is, are the "past" ones real, and will the "future" ones really happen?
This story of our lives, of who we are, is what most limits us.
What is unusual, though, with Camping is that the story was a collective one that involved many people. Most stories, these days, are not collective because we are so self-oriented. We dream selfish dreams, only of ourselves and our families, but we have forgotten how to dream collective dreams. And the reason for this is the constant stream of brainwashing from the conventional media — the mouthpiece of industry — which encourages us to focus entirely on the story and fulfilment of self, in order to encourage enormous and profitable levels of consumption. As a consequence, we have forgotten any sense of collective destiny and the purpose it can bring.
This loss of collective meaning and purpose in our lives, for the sake of our rampant economic systems, is the cause of so much ennui that we witness today, especially in the younger generations. We need collective purpose — a grand vision of the future — that goes beyond the fulfillment of our own little lives. The whole paradigm of separate human beings and small family units competitively pitted against each other in an economic arena, makes your average human being, living in your average Western society, quite psychotic.
That is why 2012-type prophecies are so popular — the world is crying out for purpose, for something bigger, something outside the remit of our psychotic selfishness. The pendulum has swung too far into individuality, so that our primary collective expression has become one of our psychotic selfishness, which is why society is so short-sighted that it is quite happy to destroy the very environment that sustains it for a few pieces of silver.
Even though Camping's actual prophecy of a world end is not a constructive vision of the future, we actually need more visionaries like Harold Camping who can shake people out of the trance of individuality and selfishness. With more positive prophecies and goals, most of us would be only too willing to welcome some real collective purpose in our psychotic little lives. That purpose will not be good for the economy, which is why it is unlikely to come from our governments and the mainstream media, but it will galvanize in some manner as more of us are realizing that the age of self-orientation, so cherished in mainstream society, is coming to an end as we wake up to our imminent collective destruction.