The End of the Suffering World

(c) Dennis Wong / Flickr.com

Doomsday and dystopian themes in American movies are often blockbusters. Those arresting fictional images of global chaos suspend our disbelief as we watch them, and questions about our threatened existence keep blowing our minds. We have seen zombies, nuclear wars, alien invasions, viral epidemics, terrorism and anarchy, comets and asteroids, massive earthquakes and other natural disasters, “big brother” governments, machine/robots domination and many others that instilled us fear on our life and our  future.

I have watched a few of these films. The stories are disturbing and gripping with all their destructive and appalling imagery. Perhaps these films have helped people to visualize what doomsday would look like. From such vivid depiction, they are prompted to  seriously ask questions if such images would really happen in the world. The images of destruction were so glamorized that the Hollywood effect on our imagination has gripped us into such illusion of uncontrollable chaos. But what benefit did it bring us?

At the turn of the millennium, a number of prophecies have spread out, of which the most famous – and notorious is this date: December 21, 2012. Many authors and experts have discussed over its significance. Like those movie themes, this date is so much feared. The Mayans, an ancient and lost South American civilization, predicted such phenomenon, and this has become a popular and hyped topic, to the point where many people really believe that the world is really about to end. But more than a week have passed after a most-awaited doomsday date and nothing happened. It appears that the prophecies have failed, but I think it is no more about the prophecy than the importance of what we are really waiting for.

It is through Love that we can always begin.

I am not well-versed in any prophecies or conspiracy theories but I have heard a handful of them. I am not even capable of proving or debunking any of them. Though one thing is very obvious to me – we are all suffering from the idea of how we are all going to end. And before such thing would happen (even if it might not happen at all), we are continuously suffering on all levels of our existence. Calamities, disasters, tragedies, violence, injustice, poverty are all but images of destruction that often dubbed as symptoms of the ending world. They all have wreaked havoc in our society unnoticed by many of us who go on with our lives, impassive of all these seemingly doomsday phenomena around us.

Perhaps we do not need the image of doomsday. We only need to open our eyes and see what is really happening in the world. Not to pay attention is to deny the wounds of suffering that we all painfully share. This does not just apply to the major and sweeping impact of suffering. It also applies to the systematic realities that we often perpetuate and tend to ignore – the spirit of greed and enmity that fuels the engine of our civilization, the ways we devalue and disregard our interconnectedness with fellow human beings and with our Earth as our home, and our obsession towards preserving dysfunctional beliefs. They are now coming to an end. We need not to wait, let alone wait an exact date for it,  for that time has already come.

(c) Kettukusu / Flickr.com

The world as we know it  is the one that is ending. I have often heard this from the wise teachers I have met and read. I have tried to validate it in the perspective of Love, and I have since then appreciated what they really mean. This world we have created has always been operating on divisiveness, greed and hatred. The world where we live has continuously perpetuated our seemingly endless sufferings. The repercussions of these sufferings are so unbearable that it motivated those seemingly powerless souls to stand up and take a step. Now, a growing global community of people finds alternative, creative and beneficial ways to impact change and transformation. Their quantum leap is what ends this suffering world.

The hullabaloo of many doomsday films is not a reliable basis of how the world will end.  The end comes when we continue to play with our ignorance and neglect of the realities of our collective suffering. For those who choose to think and act with Love, true awareness dawns on them, and that end is not truly an end, but a beginning of living a Loving wisdom, of doing meaningful actions to ease and end the suffering of humanity in many small and radical ways. Those doomsday prophecies do not matter anymore. It is through Love that we can always begin.

Related articles

• Apocalypse Predictions Are Nothing New: A Look At Doomsday Theories (newyork.cbslocal.com)
• After Mayan Apocalypse Failure, Believers May Suffer (livescience.com)
• The Doomsday Mindset (healnowtherapyhypnosis.blogspot.com)