If we do, I am sure that its citizens will thank us for it, just as we should be thankful that the greatest souls of centuries past still speak to us with relevant voices precisely because they found the eternal within their own time. Shakespeare or Ibn 'Arabi or Lao Tsu would be of far less interest if they had spent their time chatting about the great days to come ten or twenty years down the line.

Perhaps we are approaching a major turning point in human history. Perhaps a New Age, a Paradigm Shift, an Omega Point is upon us. Personally I doubt that it is, but even granting for the sake of argument that it is, so what? Talking about it won't make it proceed any faster. Moreover, the imagination and compassion required to navigate such an epoch can't be any more or any less than those same qualities demanded of humanity in every era.

No doubt it took a lot of willpower and love to make it through the Renaissance, and all sorts of people rose to the occasion as that "new age" proceeded incrementally. However, I doubt that it would have happened any better or any faster if da Vinci had hired a press agent and spent his time going on book tours promoting the concept of the Renaissance. On the contrary, if the early years of that particular turning point had been filled with legions of Renaissance spokespersons rushing around talking up the Renaissance idea, it would probably have turned into a passing fad that soon collapsed under its own pretensions, as is now happening with the current "New Age" phenomenon.

I believe that the millennium and the days to come would be best served by people uncoupling their personal ideological wagons from the train of history and vowing to drag them under their own steam. Every promise of a transformed tomorrow has always been at least a partial lie, because the future itself has the final say. This is not to say that transformations do not happen — they do, constantly. But just as the Tao always embodies a dynamic equilibrium between yin and yang, and neither polarity "wins," our bright tomorrow will always be half nightmare.

This must strike some as mere cynicism — after all, the human spirit must dream! However, the twentieth century's special gift to wisdom has been the spectacle of glorious dream after glorious dream ending not with sweet success but with ignoble disaster. The war to end all wars, the proletarian revolution, the thousand-year Reich, the clean nuclear future — the list is lengthy. Alas, rather than learning any lessons about the inevitable failure of sweeping solutions, those addicted to the future have simply picked themselves up, brushed off the dust and encrusted blood, and signed on to the next panacea.

The third millennium, by dint of its symbolic weight, promises to be an irresistible magnet for every rosy (or scary) projection on the loose. As the millennium approaches, human consciousness is being quantified, mobilized, massaged, and thrust towards that marvelously arbitrary zero point, all in the service of some promise or threat voiced by those who earn their living by selling their dreams to others.

I suggest we save ourselves some serious disappointment — let's unhitch our expectations from the millenium. Our true self won't be any more present then than it already is right now; eternity won't be any closer to culmination then than it ever was. What is demanded of us now — love and compassion — is no different from what has always been and always will be. Our immediate circumstances and the world around us require our attention, and if we respond appropriately, that will suffice to pave the way for tomorrow. The millennium is an attractive mirage. Don't stop, keep walking.




From Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, no. 29 (Fall 1993). Used by arrangement with Gnosis and the author.
Copyright © 1993 by Jay Kinney.

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