A Survival Guide to the End Times was published in the UK yesterday (August 4th in the US), and you can now look inside on the Amazon website and see some of its contents. It's a simple title which plainly describes what the book is about, but it does raise a couple of questions. What are the end times, and how do you survive them?
To address the second part of that double question first, survival is preservation and what you need to preserve is the integrity of your soul because, when it comes down to it, that is all you have. That is what survives physical death, and so you need to make sure it is in the best possible condition for what comes after. Surviving the end times is not about preserving the body in the face of collapse. Bodily survival can only ever be temporary. The only true survival is spiritual.
The reality is that the end times threaten your soul. They do so because all the prevailing tendencies are anti-spiritual. Look around you. Is that not the case now? This is one way we can tell we are in such times, and every day the situation degrades further. On the other hand, on the individual level I believe many people are beginning to wake up, no doubt due to the deteriorating world situation, but when you do start to wake up and see your world crumbling about you, what do you do?
You can fight against the loss through political action but part of the end times scenario is that all outer things including institutions and even modes of action are corrupted. Political action may bring temporary reprieve here and there but it cannot bring real improvement in the sense of turning things round any more than medicine can cure a dying man. This doesn't mean one should do nothing, just as the fact someone is dying doesn't mean you shouldn't try to help them, but you have to be realistic. The world cannot stand against the end times. The word end is not there for nothing.
This brings us to what the end times might be and why many people believe them to be now. One of the simplest ways to conceive of them is as an example of entropy. Left to themselves, established systems run down and will naturally revert to chaos and disorder. This can be circumvented by intervention but there comes a point at which the forces of decay are too strong and will outrun any attempt to correct them. Dissolution increases and then gathers speed.
Another way to understand the end times is as the last phase in a cycle, and for this you have to understand the reality of how our world exists. It is the expression of spirit in matter. These are the two forces or modes of being that correspond to consciousness and that in which life externalises itself for the purposes of self-revelation, essence and substance we might say. At the beginning of a cycle, the spirit aspect dominates but as the cycle unfolds spirit recedes and the material aspect comes to the fore. Spirit never withdraws completely or all life would depart and matter return to its prime condition of formless chaos. But awareness of spirit is diminished by the greater involvement of consciousness in matter as well as the phenomenon of matter itself becoming more material, meaning more opaque to spirit. The fact that over the last 100+ years the culture has become one of atheistic materialism is another strong indication that we live in the end times. Spirit is inaccessible for most people and it requires great effort to be aware of it other than as an intellectual possibility.
To survive the end times you must actively resist the flow of life as it is now. You must stand apart from prevailing attitudes and behaviours and position yourself in the eternal which alone is unaffected by the end times tendencies of dissolution and collapse. This is what survival is all about. It means disassociating yourself from the world and centring your mind in the truth and reality of God.
There is a doom and gloom aspect to the end times. How could there not be? But in fact these times offer tremendous opportunity which is why I would guess so many souls have opted to be born now. Precisely because you have to go against the flow you can make much greater spiritual progress than at a time when outer conditions helped you and more or less took you along with them. What you achieve now is truly yours instead of being achieved for you.
That having been said, how many people are actually taking advantage of the opportunity available? It seems not many. Every aspect of life is corrupted, the ostensibly spiritual as much if not more than any other. This new book aims to help those open to the idea identify end times tendencies and then resist them. That is what is needed for survival.
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