Kees Zoeteman

It is striking how often the Apocalypse still appears in our speech. But not as a hopeful perspective. An example:

‘Whether China will have supplanted the USA as the most powerful country by 2050? She has no idea. “Who knows, there may already have been a nuclear war. And are there any raw materials left at all? Am I still alive? We may have ended up in a post-apocalyptic world, where we eat pills instead of meals.”’

Feng Yumeng, bartender in Beijing, (interview in Dutch newspaper NRC Weekend 12&13 September 2020)

Apparently, there is a feeling of doom worldwide, of an impending world collapse. In the West, the threat of evil influences is easily linked with the rise of China. That is why it is interesting that the Dutch newspaper NRC has portrayed the expectations of young people in China. The Chinese young woman quoted here also thinks of the future as an era that follows a global catastrophe. The year 2050, only thirty years from now, is in the eyes of Feng Yumeng a future in which the catastrophe has already taken place.

A week later Tommy Wieringa, who writes a weekly column in NRC (26&27 September 2020, p.2), has even more explicitly addressed this subject. I will summarise a few parts from his column:

‘A theater director … calls up and says: “I want you to write a play for me. A piece about this alarming time, after the example of Revelations. For a week or so I’m thinking about a play portraying our time. There is a lot to think about… All the disasters from Pandora’s box and nowhere hope. A heated world full of frightened people. Frightened people make bad decisions… Where our imagination usually leads us to a dramatized version of reality, in our time all climate models predict some form of apocalypse… Lucid artists and feverish prophets have imagined countless endings of the world. But with the end of the world as we know it in sight, they are stunned… The artist can make the unthinkable imaginable… I’ll try to write that piece… I already have a working title, Heat Time.’

What strikes me again is how in such discussions and proposals the subject of the Apocalypse is flattened. There is no awareness of the context of esoteric Christianity that is needed to interpret the book. But in any case, what is the worst world catastrophe we can imagine for the coming decades? What will the world look like after the catastrophe? And what does the Apocalypse itself see as the imminent downfall?

The confusion about the downfall of the world according to the Apocalypse

A ‘post-apocalyptic world’ is a concept that we will not find in the Apocalypse. The world revealed in the Apocalypse is one that has left matter behind, not as fate but as a predetermined goal. Strictly speaking, a post-apocalyptic world means a world that follows the world described in the last book of the Bible.

According to the Bible, the post-apocalyptic world is the world of the heavenly Jerusalem, the world in which man has reached his creation goal. But the term post-apocalyptic world has a completely different meaning for those who use it now. An enormous confusion has arisen over the concept of the Apocalypse because when this word is presently used only the aspect of the downfall of physical reality is emphasized, and not the simultaneous birth of a next form of manifestation of the Earth on which man has a higher consciousness. The latter is what the Apocalypse is all about. In Greek ‘calypto’ means hiding and ‘apo-calypto’ the opposite: revealing what is hidden. The reader is constantly called upon to open his or her eyes to what is revealed, to be part of the future Earth by reversing one’s own tendencies, by not merging into material desires and by gaining access to the ever-advancing world of the spirit. Against this background, a post-apocalyptic world is a nonsensical concept.

Imaginable world catastrophes in the coming decades

When someone uses the word ‘post-apocalyptic’ nowadays, it means a huge physical disaster which results in the destruction of our familiar world, while mankind has to continue to live in what is left. The 1979 American film Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola, set in Vietnam and Cambodia at the time of the Vietnam War, has projected a negative meaning of the word Apocalypse in the memory of the tens of millions of viewers of this iconic film.

This film does not show the end of the whole world, but it’s as if the world is ending because of the fierce war situation in Vietnam which seems to be a foreshadowing of what’s coming for the world as a whole.

The downfall of life on earth is the subject of numerous discussion platforms and think tanks and a grateful subject for films and novels. It is interesting to look at suggested causes of global downfall.

A widely used source in this respect, which presents possible risks of world catastrophes, is The Global Risks Perception Survey. Based on interviews with global experts, the World Economic Forum published this Survey annually at its meetings in Davos.

The report for 2019-2020 lists 14 risks with above-average impact that are ranked in Table 1 according to their estimated likelihood of occurrence. Interestingly, in February 2020 the risk of a global pandemic was not yet estimated to be very likely. It reflects the large uncertainty of this type of lists. 

Table 1. The 14 risks with the greatest consequences ranked according to their probability; source: The Global Risks Perception Survey 2019-2020; https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2020.

Risk of global disruption                              Probability (score 1 stands for very unlikely and 5 for very likely)

Extreme weather                                                                                           4.3

Climate actions fail                                                                                        4.0

Natural disasters                                                                                            3.85

Loss of biodiversity                                                                                        3.8

Man-made environmental disasters                                                       3.75

Cyber-attacks                                                                                                  3.7

Water crises                                                                                                     3.6        

Failures in global governance                                                                    3.55

Conflicts between countries                                                                      3.45

Information infrastructure failures                                                          3.3

Food crises                                                                                                       3.05

Financial failure                                                                                              3.0

Infectious diseases                                                                                        2.85

Use of weapons of mass destruction                                                       2.4

If we look at the 14 risks mentioned above, it is striking that the list is dominated by a large group of nature and climate-related risks. We can already foresee that they are coming and will determine our lives. Furthermore, there are two internet-related risks and there is a risk that the stability of the financial world will be disrupted.

What remains is the role of governments that may have conflicts with each other, such as the trade war Donald Trump started with China in response to the more soft-handed imperialism -the famous iron fist in a velvet glove- of China. China is increasingly manifesting itself as the big opponent of the USA in the world. National governments can use weapons of mass destruction or fail to work together to combat global crises, as occasionally manifested in the Covid-19 pandemic.  Failing governments can greatly amplify a global disaster. Especially large countries, that do not want to comply with a general global interest, can do a lot of harm.

What strikes me about such lists is that a new danger is often not seen (Kees Zoeteman, 2014, Trends, crises and sustainability, in: Ed K. Zoeteman, Sustainable development drivers, p. 303-318, Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar).  For example, few policymakers are concerned with the colonization of space, starting with the higher air layers around the earth. This has already been discussed in the blog about 5G (https://www.project-apocalypse.com/blog/the-future-that-is-preparing-above-our-heads/). The global risks, which the World Economic Forum is now discussing, are of a lesser magnitude than those that can threaten us from space: the natural risks associated with radiation from the sun and interstellar space, and those associated with meteorite impacts. Increasingly, we are causing these risks ourselves in the higher layers of the atmosphere. The now widely recognized risk of climate change and related effects will be followed by even larger risks from space. If mankind is not able to exercise a decisive leadership in managing our planet, all people will be in real physical danger. I suspect that we will only unite when we are threatened collectively and concretely from space. It is important, however, to learn in advance how to do that. The pandemics caused by viruses are good opportunities to practice this.

What does the Apocalypse itself see as the imminent downfall?

Nevertheless, all such disasters are not the demise of the physical world to which the Apocalypse refers, although some disasters such as earthquakes, meteorite strikes and plague epidemics are mentioned in the Apocalypse. In the Apocalypse, a completely different paradigm for looking at natural life is used than the one dominant in mainstream science. We now try to explain everything in a materialistic way only. That is why we only take material causes of disasters into account.  But the Apocalypse sees the physical world as a consequence of what takes place in higher realms: that of the spirit, that of the soul and that of the life forces. As human beings, we are part of these higher realms, but many of us are not aware of them. The Apocalypse is a great call to awaken for this truth. And even if we are not aware of it, the Apocalypse predicts that spiritual reality will become noticeable for everyone in the course of evolution.

First the physical Earth will dissolve. Physicists foresee similar impacts as what they call the heat death of the Earth. This will occur when the Sun has used up its hydrogen in the current nuclear reaction from hydrogen to helium. The Sun will subsequently expand and a new nuclear fusion reaction will occur in which helium merges into carbon. On Earth all water will evaporate and the atmosphere will be blown away by the stronger solar wind. All this is expected to happen in the very distant future, after more than a billion years. By the way, we should in my opinion not overestimate the reality of these scientifically extrapolated time periods. We simply do not know, although we can of course make calculations on the basis of assumptions as to where such time periods will end up. But such assumptions are constantly changing. The most important thing that the Apocalypse describes about world destruction is that creation will return to the higher spiritual levels in stages and then a new solar system with a new earth will emerge. In order to be able to keep up with this evolution, people will have to be ready to let go of the solid matter of their bodies and then of the life forces and finally of the soul forces. We experience a similar process now individually in dying, life after death and reincarnating. This we will experience in the future at a global level. Those who cannot join the process of spiritualization, will ultimately experience the Apocalypse as a doom story, just as the shadow of death hangs over the individual life which is only experienced as a materialistic matter. The Apocalypse, as already mentioned, wants to point out that death is not the end of everything, nor is the dissolution of the physical Earth. Earth and life originated from a higher consciousness and to this higher consciousness everything will return, unless we choose not to be part of that. That is also possible. Then, Heat Time of Tommy Wieringa is the only perspective awaiting us.