Reading this stuff can be dreadful, but hey, it’s not the end of the world. 🙂 I’ll try to present it in a way that’s reasonable, maybe even hopeful if that’s possible.

Until I got involved in ITC back in the early 1990s, I never gave much thought to Armageddon or the Apocalypse—cataclysmic years of big wars, population explosion, environmental destruction, and natural disasters that might someday decimate humanity.  Then…

• Metascience founder George Meek gave me a copy of his Collapse and Comeback report,
• And he introduced me to the Harsch-Fischbach couple in Luxembourg, whose reliable spirit friends at Timestream had some insightful and surprising things to say about the End Time.

Since then I’ve been trying to figure out what’s really going on with the whole End Time scenario. I’ll try to explain it as clearly as I can in a moment, but first let’s glimpse some of the more popular eschatological visions, both old and new, to find common threads.

Popular End Time Scenarios

There are both worldly symptoms and other-worldly implications associated with the End Time idea. Religions generally look at both, while science and other secular studies concern themselves only with the worldly information (which, by itself, can be a little daunting).

Worldly signs. Deteriorating geological, social, political, and moral conditions on Planet Earth support the notion that we’re approaching some sort of cataclysm. Signs include:

• Christian view: “War on a large scale, famine, great earthquakes, pestilences or epidemics of terrible diseases, increase of crime, ruining the Earth by mankind, deterioration of people’s attitudes, breakdown of the family, love of God growing cold, noteworthy displays of religious hypocrisy….” — from the Jehovah’s Witnesses
• Hindu view: “…property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation; and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification. Earth will be venerated only for its mineral treasures….” — Vishnu Purana
• Scientific, technological view: Artificial Intelligence could evolve on the Internet into a global brain that perceives us 7 billion humans as being too destructive for the planet and for our own good, so devises ways to eliminate the parasitic infestation that we’ve become. Gamma rays from nearby supernovas could surge through our solar system, destroying life. Bioengineered viruses could spread epidemics on an epic scale. Particle physics experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider, could go awry and cause massive explosions and earthquakes. — from The End of the World podcast by Josh Clark
• Political, economic view: “Secular eschatological visions… have been responsible for more death and destruction in the twentieth century than the minor mischief caused by religious visions of the end. Of the three great mythic-political systems that promised an end to ordinary history and the dawning of utopia, the communist dream of a classless society and the fascist vision of a thousand-year Reich resulted in the deaths of millions before they collapsed. The jury is still out on the American version of the myth of progress. But things are not looking good….” — from A Secular Apocalypse by Sam Keen

Spiritual implications. All of the great, time-proven religions promise a reawakening or a rising-up of noble humanity after its savage fall. Examples include:

• Christian rapture: Around the time of his death, Jesus told his disciples that he’d precede them to the afterlife, set up a nice place in paradise, then return to greet them and to accompany them there at the end of their lives (John 14:1-3). Other Christian writings add that Jesus will return at the end of the current epoch to take all of his followers to his afterlife paradise in a state of rapture.
• Buddhist resurrection: Some 2,500 years ago, Gautama Buddha told his followers that his teachings would be forgotten after many centuries, when greed, lust, poverty, murder, and sexual deviancy cause social collapse, and then a new, all-knowing Buddha called Maitreya will appear on Earth to enlighten humanity for a new epoch.
• Hindu cycles and stages: Hindu scripture offers a more intricate scenario. A day of Brahman (4,320,000,000 years) consists of 1,000 cycles called maha yugas (each lasting 4,320,000 years), each cycle containing four stages:
  1. Golden Age. Noble human supergiants, 32 feet tall, have 100,000-year lifespans.
  2. Silver Age. Human giants, 21 feet tall, are 3 parts noble and 1 part savage, and live about 10,000 years.
  3. Bronze Age. Humans, 11 feet tall, are half noble and half savage, and live about 1,000 years.
  4. Iron Age. By stage 4, humans are now only 5-6 feet tall, are 1 part noble and 3 parts savage, and live about 100 years.
     Today we’re near the end of stage 4, a time of darkness when human consciousness is engrossed in material living. We’ve lost touch with our noble spiritual heritage. Hindus say this current stage might have begun around 3102 BCE and could end as early as 2025 or continue a while longer). When the end comes, Lord Vishnu will return to Earth incarnated as Kalki to destroy the darkness that has engulfed the planet… and to return us to another golden age of truth. Then it’s back to stage 1 as the next 4.32-million-year cycle begins.

All of these worldly End Time scenarios have a similar theme: The savage aspect of humanity causes ever greater destruction on Earth until it all falls apart.

Then spiritual scenarios take over: Other-worldly forces intervene to clean up the savage mess and to restore humanity’s noble bearing.

End Time in a Nutshell

Over the past two centuries, degrading conditions that distress the Earth are like fast-growing cancer cells that are killing the body. The only effective treatment for planetary malaise (as far as I can see) would be a world authority that regulates population, environmental integrity, and military activity… but that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. So world crises seem to be coming to a head. Sources for the top chart: World History For Us All (UCLA), the EPA… and the National Review. Source for the lower chart: Gregory Chi-Yu Lee, via Researchgate.

Planet Earth today is like someone in the late stages of cancer.

• The rapid growth of malignant tumors suggests a personal end time, in a similar way that…
• The rapid rise of population, war deaths, environmental destruction, and natural disasters suggests a planetary End Time.

Those, again, are all worldly signs of “the end.”

Then spiritual factors step in to assure us that the end is really just the beginning… or that it’s all just part of an endless cycle.

• When a person succumbs to cancer (or to any other cause of death), he or she immediately resumes living in the worlds of spirit.
• There have apparently been many End Times (dark ages) on Earth of various magnitude, always followed by a spiritual renaissance (age of enlightenment), during which finer spiritual forces stream love and understanding into our world.

Here’s what we learned about the End Time through ITC contacts (reliable, high-tech communications with the other side through a stable portal).

The Seven Ethereals told our INIT group in 1996, through a computer at our main European station in Luxembourg:

We have often given you the real purpose of ITC contacts: Mankind at the End Time should be led back to the principle. Light and darkness shall unite and form a whole again. What people experience now is not the actual beginning of the apocalypse, but only the first symptoms.

The principle, or source, emits light (life-force) that creates and nourishes all life throughout the omniverse. Everything that receives the light feels it as an all-embracing love. When it reaches Earth, however, some of the light is deflected by the brutal nature of the planet, where living things kill and eat each other to supplement their life-force… a process that has come to fill the world with fear, suffering, indignation, and grief. The result is like sunlight deflected off a building. It casts a sort of shadow, creating a dark spirit realm of troubled thoughts and motivations that envelops our world like an invisible storm cloud.

So the first thing we need to do is to understand what they mean by “the principle” and by “light and darkness.”

• The principle, or source, is what religions call God, Allah, Yahweh, Brahman, Tao, or Nirvana.
• Light is the life-force inherent in the principle that manifests and sustains the entire omniverse and everything in it.
• Darkness is a condition, exclusive to Earth, caused by our “dog-eat-dog” way of life—a sort of shadow realm of spiritual residue, as depicted in the small illustration. I suspect that killing and eating each other (as living things on Earth do) is inconceivable just about everywhere else in the omniverse, where (I suspect) everything is nourished almost entirely by life-force from the source.

So when our ethereal friends say, “Light and darkness shall unite and form a whole again,” I believe they mean that once the Earth “hits bottom” and reaches its worst period of suffering, the dark, shadowy spiritual residue around our world will somehow be pulled into the light of the omniverse to be cleansed and maybe polished away like tarnish from silver. At the same time, intense, healing light and love will be streamed to Earth from the finer realms of spirit.

In another 1996 ITC contact, The Seven told us:

It makes no difference what religion you belong to. What matters is the victory of reason and understanding over materialism and irrationality at the End Time.

Hopefully, articles like this one can provide a small step toward “reason and understanding” of what we all face today in terms of endings, new beginnings, and the cyclic, timeless nature of life.

Meanwhile, the best we can do during a lifetime on Earth (where we’re locked into certain savage behaviors, like eating other living things) is to make noble choices from day to day, such as helping other living things to be happy and healthy.

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ITC contacts like the two above can be found in our original Contact! journals, especially issue 9603 (page 5) and issue 9702 (page 16).

(Issue 9603 also has an article on page 10 about how humans can reconcile the fact that we have to kill and eat other living things during a lifetime. It includes the passage, “Keep on eating the meat and vegetables you need to subsist, but be grateful for what you eat. Prayers at the table spoken from the heart will help you not to feel like you have blood on your hands.”)