On my walk yesterday I see a car with a sticker saying 'Wakacje spełnionych marzeń' - something like 'dreams-come-true holidays' or 'wishes-fulfilled holidays' [I wrote here about the differences between the English and Polish words for 'dream']. Can we imagine a wish-fulfilment holiday in which your dreams (marzenia rather than sny) actually come true? A final realisation of everything you ever wanted, all on one holiday? A far-fetched marketing fancy.
Fulfilled wishes run on into the End of Times; the final closure. Question: does it all come right in the end? Resolution of all untied threads, the completion of everyone's last project, with nothing more to worry about, ever?
My father died in the autumn of 2019. His final project was fixing a broken windowpane. Brexit (which he was vehemently against) had yet to happen; Covid hadn't escaped from the Wuhan wet-market, and Putin's imperial malevolence in Ukraine was confined to Donbas and Crimea. It was as good a time to die as any - had he survived the winter into the spring of 2020, the pandemic would have become a major cause of anxiety for him in his final days.
Things always change, but never resolve. Like gardening. New chores, new challenges every season. The garden is never 'done'. Like squishing a ball of Plasticine - you can make it smaller, but it will always try to ooze out between your fingers. There's always a new worry emerging, a new issue to solve.
The study of end of times is called eschatology, "which in the context of mysticism, the term refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality and to reunion with the divine". And in the context of cosmology, it would refer to the end-point of the Universe, which - barring an eternal cycle of expansion and contraction - would be its heat death, when all energy has been used up, entropy can no longer increase, the last photon fizzles out, ceases to move.
What then of Consciousness? Where would it reside? Matter, energy, vibration, would cease - would the Universe be pure Consciousness at this stage? Ready for the next Big Bang? Ready to go through it all again - or would this be both the end of time? Nobel laureate, Sir Roger Penrose, posits that if there is no vibration, there can be no frequency; without any frequency, there is no clock to measure time - so it is literally the end of time - but would this be the moment of a final, divine Unity? How would that square with notions of non-duality - that the Material and Spiritual Worlds finally becoming One?
Or can we even begin to get our heads around this notion of End of Times - that we, descendants of apes (somewhat more advanced but even so) are a species so far from total understanding?
If in some mystical way, the End of Times is the One, Big Bang being Zero - then is the journey a finite one (that can be measured in trillions of years) - or is it Eternal, a journey that never reaches an end point?
Trying to create a belief system based on subjective intuition rather than empirically provable scientific fact is not easy - but is it better to try than to simply abandon the whole enterprise as being objectively unrealistic?
This time last year:
Praise the Sun God
This time two years ago
Divine Inspiration: God and Artists
This time three years ago:
SO?
This time four years ago:
A Brief History of Time reviewed
This time five years ago:
Eyes without a face
This time six years ago:
London blooms in yellow
This time seven years ago:
London's Docklands: a case-study in urban regeneration
This time eight years ago:
Scotland and its language
This time nine years ago:
Death, our sister
This time 11 years ago:
The iconic taste of Marmite
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