There is a profound irony here at the end of history. The realization that neither the world nor we are physical beings may enable us to survive as if we were such, well beyond what otherwise would be the end of the world. We will be able to survive more or less as we are for an extended period of borrowed time, only if we are fully aware that by doing so we are maintaining a fiction.

Clearly we are being presented with a challenge. We are like the sleepwalker awoken at the edge of the precipice. Our dream of physicality can be maintained, but now only with a deliberate effort.

The above irony begs the question of necessity. Why bother to wake up at all? The reason is that we are, by most accounts, rapidly approaching the end of the world unless there is a profound change in our collective thinking. I submit that our belated turning to the truth at the very end is our only hope for transcending that end. But not to fear -- this has been the plan from before the beginning. It is just this ending and this transcending that gives meaning and substance to history.

The same question can also be turned the other way. Why bother to maintain the fiction of physicality? The answer is, at the risk of considerable oversimplification, that we can have our 'physical' cake and eat it too, in some not yet fully revealed sense. And by maintaining that fiction we are decreasing the risk of tripping over the eschaton and falling headfirst into that cake, not a pretty sight. That would be a full-blown apocalypse, heaven forbid. In any case, as fast as our minds can think it, the bedrock of our present reality is transformed into a sideshow of what will then become our new heaven and new earth.

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rev. 2/5/98