Eschatology

This blogspot could be considered to be an ‘eschatological’ site.

It discusses the end of things, as does the doctrine of eschatology, which covers everything from an apocalyptic ending of the world or civilisation, to something rather less definitively ‘final’. The primary focus here is the end of life, but also change.

Humans have (quite naturally, because we die) an obsession with endings. And with news media providing a relentless diet of negativity, we are programmed to believe that the world is permanently on the brink of disaster, which may lead to our own demise (which is the one thing that might really get our attention).

And the biggest revenue-grossing films are almost always about that one thing: catastrophe and human demise. We flock to cinemas to view the destruction of our world, or perhaps our galaxy, or maybe multiple galaxies.

The reality is that for all the catastrophic events that have decimated civilisations, such as The Flood, The Ice Age, and The Volcano Eruption (which cooled and darkened the earth), humanity (and the earth itself) are both still alive and well. The only snag is that we will certainly die, so we probably ought to make preparations for that event.

But for today’s sleepless humans who require a relentless diet of ‘news action’, as Tom Phillips says in his witty 2025 book A Brief History of the End of the World: 3,000 Years of Getting It Wrong (So Far), a headline stating “World to end” is more appealing than “World to continue as before”.

But if we are honest, most people struggle with the idea of ‘change’. It disturbs us, as we want stability, peace and quiet. But change has been going on relentlessly for a very long time.

Lawrence R Spencer (author of the astounding book Alien Interview about humanity’s future) put it well in his equally excellent 1999 book The Oz Factors when he observed that many of us, just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, feel as though we have crash-landed far, far from our own personal home; far away from the place in our hearts or in our dreams where everything is just exactly the way we want it to be.

We don’t quite know what happened to our home, or how we ended up where we are now, but we have a vague, fleeting feeling that our home is still there, waiting for us to come back.

The problem is that we don’t have answers to questions about these most basic things, so life always has a traumatic undertone, a fear which is plundered by our Controllers for their advantage.

Things like: When will things change again? What will happen then? Or even more fundamentally, Where am I now? How did I get here? Where is here?

Or perhaps as the existential writers such as Chatwin, Rimbaud, Sartre, Camus and Dostoevsky have said, “What am I doing here?”

Ultimately though, it all does end. At least for our bodies.

Eckhart Tolle recounts in The Power of Now what a Buddhist monk once told him:

All I have learned in twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence:

“All that arises passes away. This I know”.

When we are young, we don’t think about death. We feel life is limitless.

Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited called it the ‘languor of youth’ – those heady days when we are young and everything is ahead of us, when everything seems possible. We can waste as much time as we want, because there is so much ahead.

But time is not limitless. We must use it well.

17 August 2026