DEAR FELLOW MEMBERS OF THE BEAUTY AND TRUTH TRIBE,

I confess that I suffer from a peculiar variety of chauvinism. I'm not zealously inflated about the glory of my religion or region or football team, but rather of the era I live in. I fantasize that our moment in history is more important than all the others that have come before. I harbor the secret hope that those of us alive today are on the cusp of a radical turning point in the evolution of humanity.

It's a little embarrassing. It associates me with wacky millennialists of all stripes, from histrionic New Age prophets to fundamentalist Christians who fanatically await the "end times." And as much as I would like to imagine my views are subtler and more rational than those of the superstitious extremists, I must admit that I sometimes catch myself dreaming of how deliriously interesting it would be if the sour mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as "reality" really did mutate "in the twinkling of an eye," as the Bible insinuates.

Did I scoff at the scaremongers who shivered at the approach of Y2K? Well, yeah, I mostly did. But there was also a Drama King in a dark corner of my psyche who indulged in perversely thrilling fantasies about the possibility that the melodramatic doomsayers might be right. The same is true about my relationship with the Nostradamus wannabes who forecast "earth changes" and a global economic depression in the face of the massive conjunction of planets in Taurus in May, 2000. Ditto the "Cosmic Crucifixion" predicted for August, 1999, when a solar eclipse coincided with a seemingly alarming array of planetary configurations.

And yet there is another part of me, a voice that feels older and wiser, who suspects that even if we ARE on the verge of an evolutionary turning point, even if those of us who are alive today *will* experience the End of Life As We Know It, it just won’t be as simple and obvious and bad as the literalist prophets fantasize. The transformation will not come via some cataclysmic overnight world-wide presto-chango like an asteroid plunging into the earth or the reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles or massive solar flares baking the planet -- or even the most appalling terrorist attack in history.

It is this same part of me -- the older, wiser voice -- who is deeply distrustful of how utterly disposed our culture is to seeing the worst in everything. It amazes me that cynicism is regarded as a supreme sign of intelligence; that Things Falling Apart are inherently more interesting than Things in the Throes of Creative Rebirth. Nineteenth-century poet John Keats once observed that "If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true." But the majority of the prophets, like most of the intelligentsia, the media, and our political leaders, believe the exact opposite: "If something is not ugly, it is probably not true."

Luckily, the jingoistic part of me that yearns to be alive when Everything Changes can find a common ground with the cool eternal part of me that regards the entropy-worshiping, all-or-nothing mindset as a unique signature of the civilization that's dying. Together these two aspects of my psyche can collaborate to conclude the following:

WE ARE INDEED LIVING THROUGH THE APOCALYPSE RIGHT NOW.

But it is nothing like the end of the world visualized by any of the usual suspects. It's different in four ways.

1. It is a slow, gradual apocalypse.

2. The apocalypse is usually invisible to most of us, popping into our conscious awareness only on rare occasions.

3. The apocalypse is as much about rebirth as collapse.

4. The primary way most of us experience the apocalypse is through the intimate events of our personal lives.

I'll explore these four points in more detail.

1. THE APOCALYPSE IS HAPPENING IN SLOW MOTION. It has been going on for decades and it will continue to unfold for many years. Sudden, sensational punctuations arise now and then to expedite it, but for the most part it ferments continuously in the background. Most days bring no emergency that is beyond our capacity to bear, but the cumulative effects of the transfigurations that relentlessly weave themselves into our lives have turned every one of us into towering heroes whose courageous endurance dwarfs the valor of all humans who have come before us.

2. THE APOCALYPSE IS FOR THE MOST PART INVISIBLE, and here's the most extreme evidence: Very few of us have registered the fact that we are in the midst of the largest mass extinction of life on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs. This is the conclusion of a poll of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, a professional society of 5,000 scientists. Think of it: Animal and plant species are dying off at a rate unmatched in 65 million years, and almost no one knows -- or grieves.

But the work-in-progress that is the apocalypse is not always cloaked. Now and then a single riveting event transfixes our collective emotions, driving millions of us deep into a visceral realization of just how fragile our hold is on life's sweet mysteries. For a brief interlude, the covert, slow motion upheaval explodes into plain view; the hidden truth becomes an open secret. The Gulf War was one of those events, and 2000's disputed presidential election can be counted as a minor outbreak. Maybe nothing exposed the ongoing apocalypse more poignantly, at least for us Americans, than the mass murder perpetrated by kamikaze hijackers on September 11.

3. THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE WORD "APOCALYPSE" WAS "REVELATION," and in the esoteric spiritual traditions of the West, the apocalypse is regarded as a Great Awakening -- a marvelous resurrection.

I propose that the apocalypse we're living through applies in both the degraded modern sense of the word -- the end of the world -- and in the original sense. In other words, collapse and renewal are happening side by side; calamity and blooming; rot and splendor; grievous losses and unpredictable surges of miraculous novelty. Yes, the end of the old world is proceeding apace; but it is overlapped by the birth pangs of a fresh, hot civilization that will be beautiful beyond all imagining.

Often the horrifying mayhem and the gorgeous regeneration have no link. But in the case of the trauma of last September 11, I propose that they were meshed. My mailbox was filled with emails from people writing to testify about how the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington, D.C. inspired them to live more authentically. Their dedication to creating peace and love and understanding leaped to a higher octave; their petty worries dropped away, leaving them passionately focused on their core spiritual values; they were roused by an electrifying new clarity of purpose, which incited them to stop wasting their time on dead-end, low-priority desires and instead channel all their vital force into accomplishing their most essential goals; and they had direct perceptions -- gut-level, intuitive, soul-enriching gnosis -- that We Are All One.

It's as if millions of people had a simultaneous Near Death Experience and harvested the revivifying fruits that typically come to those who have peered over to the other side of the veil.

Here's another possible example of mayhem and regeneration arising from a single set of events, suggested by healer Caroline Myss in her book *Energy Anatomy:* China's brutal invasion and occupation of Tibet in the 1950s resulted in the exile of the Dalai Lama, which ultimately brought that great soul's influence, along with his beautiful brand of Buddhism, to the entire world with a breadth and depth that would never have happened otherwise.

Can you think of other breakdowns/breakthroughs that fit this description?

4. MOST OF THE TIME WE EXPERIENCE APOCALYPSE NOT THROUGH THE BIG, BAD EVENTS LIKE THE SEPTEMBER 11 MASSACRES, but rather through the details of our personal lives. The radical but gradual revolution, the agonizing death of the old order and slow bloom of the new, are framed in the storylines of your most intimate dramas. Again and again over the years, you are pushed to a brink that challenges you to either rise to the occasion or decay. The crises may come in the form of a divorce or illness or job loss, or even in less dramatic events like a misunderstanding with a friend or the inexplicable waning of a once-passionate dream.

And seeded inside each of these personal turning points is the crux of the ongoing global apocalypse: You get to choose whether you will adjust by taking a path that keeps you in alignment with the values of the dying world or else that makes you hum in resonance with the new civilization that is being born. In effect, you get the chance to vote, with your entire life, for which aspect of the apocalypse you want to predominate.

*

If you've been reading my newsletter in recent months, you know that we've been ruminating on PRONOIA, which is the opposite of paranoia. Pronoia is the unshakable conviction that life is a conspiracy to liberate you from suffering, fill you with joy, and make you really smart.

As sweet and exalted as pronoia feels in our bodies, however, it is not meant to become a force of repression. Pronoia thrives on an engagement with difficult emotions and challenging events, not by ignoring them.

In that spirit, I ask you: How might you respond to the part of the apocalypse that brings collapse and decay? Will it be with actions that express rage, revenge, hatred, tribalism, fear, and all the primitive emotions that have nourished the roots of the dying civilization? Or will it be with actions that express ingenious compassion, creative inclusiveness, expansive empathy, and all the noble emotions that will be at the heart of the new world to come?

A few more questions for you before I conclude:

What will you do to focus your personal experience of the apocalypse on liberation rather than entropy?

How will you respond to the Goddess's invitation to mercy-kill the bad habits and rotting attitudes that interfere with your ability to express your soul’s code -- the blueprint you came to Earth to carry out?

What if there is even a grain of truth in the notion that what we expect will happen tends to come to pass? What if it's insane and stupid to revel in visions of doom to the exclusion of all other scenarios? What if it's dumb and crazy to be entertained by bad news and to ignore and dismiss and be bored by good news?

How can you personally starve the bad apocalypse -- the forces that tend to lead to loss, corruption, and decay? How can you personally nurture the good apocalypse -- the influences that foster redemption, renewal, and reinvention? What leaps of the imagination and creative actions can you take to crush rampant nihilism? What entertaining tricks can you summon to help shape an environment in which it is more fun and interesting to play with boom and zoom instead of doom and gloom?

With rowdy blessings,

Rob