Perhaps the simplest, albeit simplisitic, way of representing the transition period between the mental and mystical periods of evolution is this diagram, an extension of one on the last page of Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture.

The $64,000 question is then what happens at the crossover point that we are currently passing through? During the past couple of years, the economies of a number of countries, not the least the USA, have been plunging into recession. But there is very little understanding of why this is so on the Cosmic scale of existence.

Basically, as ‘Our evolutionary story’ outlines and as Chapter 5 ‘An Integral Theory of Evolution’ in Wholeness shows quite clearly, evolution is currently passing through its point of accumulation in systems theory terms, the most momentous turning point in its fourteen billion-year history. Furthermore, as Chapter 6 ‘An Evolutionary Cul-de-Sac’ shows, Western civilization has now reached a dead end in its development because it is further away from Reality than any other civilization in human history.

Most particularly, because of the long-running war between science and religion, neither side in this conflict can explain what is causing the pace of technological development to accelerate exponentially. We are a species that has lost its way, blindly managing our business affairs with very little understanding of the evolutionary energies that are causing us to behave in this insane manner.

Yes, there is a spiritual renaissance taking place in the world today as more and more people are discovering that the Divine Essence we all share is Love, leading to the re-emergence of Homo divinus divinus. But it is conflict-ridden Homo divinus analyticus at first-tier levels of consciousness that still governs the world, laying down economic laws that cause severe psychological and ecological damage, leading Homo sapiens sapiens to the brink of extinction.

We can use Shakyamuni Buddha’s three marks of being (trilakshana) to come to terms with the imminent death of Western civilization and the global economy and the eventual death of the human race itself. As he said, there is nothing permanent in the Universe (anitya) and if we do not accept this by becoming free of the sense of a separate self (anatman), we shall suffer (duhkha).

In this way, we can live in the bliss of Nirvana or Satchidananda with exquisite joy, knowing, with the jnanis and gnostics (cognates of know), that birth and death are just illusions, not real in an Absolute sense. As human beings, we are simply actors on a stage, living in a dreamworld.

It is only when we know this truth in the depth of our beings that we can return Home to Paradise, where we were all conceived as both individuals and as a species. It is from this Divine Space, with the accelerating pace of the awakening of love, intelligence, and consciousness, that we could perhaps cocreate a sane society living in peace and harmony. But there is no need to speculate on whether such a utopian vision will actually become manifest.

We are just a few years away from the total collapse of the global economy in an apocalyptic catastrophe, as many visionaries have prophesied, when all be revealed. For apocalypse derives from apokaluptein ‘to uncover’ or ‘to reveal’ from the Greek prefix apo, ‘from, away’ and kaluptra, ‘veil’. So apocalypse literally means ‘draw the veil away from’, indicating the disclosure of something hidden from the mass of humanity.