I want to follow up on a few ideas from my article, The Trans-Temporal Kingdom of God, while the topic is still fresh in my mind. The main thing I actually want to talk about is the so-called Y2K situation that we faced. I have a really silly book I bought a few years ago for a dollar in a thrift store entitled 101 Ways to Survive the Y2K Crisis. When you open the book, the first thing you see is this equally hilarious quote from the US Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem (from Feb. 1999):

[Y2K is] one of the most serious and potentially devastating events this nation has ever encountered. … This problem will affect us all individually and collectively in very profound ways.

Looking back, it seems like the most profound way that it affected us was as a giant let-down. I talked about this elsewhere in my Pop Tarot Millenium card, but it seems like it deserves a little elaboration here. In my Kingdom of God article, I wrote:

[…] We could read texts such as the Book of Revelations as a spiritual instruction book, detailing for us using symbolic entities the challenges which we will face in freeing ourselves from the bonds of linear time, and approaching the timeless transcendent Kingdom of God.

Put more simply, the Apocalypse fantasy functions to break us out of the humdrum everyday world into a world of psycho-spiritual potency. The Book of Revelations is extremely powerful as a manual for this type of personal transformation, because it uses very powerful symbolism, and goes through the whole process - from the bad, to the very bad, to the eventual transition into the positive. It contains very strong symbols which act as signposts for every step of the way.

The way that we know we’re stepping into a psychological realm in the Book of Revelations is by the author’s telling us so. First he says:

I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet

Then he turns around and sees a figure which is not of this earth:

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white like wool, as white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

We immediately know that we’re not dealing with ordinary reality here, but something which transcends it. This and other following figures then act as psychopomps for the visionary John of Patmos. Psychopomps in religious tradition are gods or other entities which escort the soul upon death into the afterlife. In shamanic traditions, the shaman may also act as a psychopomp when s/he goes into trance in order to find and retrieve the lost soul of a sick person. In Jungian psychoanalytic terms, the psychopomp acts as a guide to the contents of the unconscious mind.

Going back to Y2K, it’s interesting that at the heart of it we constructed culturally an entity called the “Y2K Bug.” While it was nothing more than an abstract representation of a class of computer errors, I think the fact that we gave it a sort of name and spritely identity is important. In fact, I’d be so bold as to say that the Y2K bug acted as our psychopomp. The Bug itself represented one of our deepest civilized fears: that we would accidentally lose track of linear time and as a result be plunged into a chaotic (read: anti-civilized) world.

Nowadays though, when we go back and hear people talk about the Y2K crisis as being one of the “most serious and potentially devastating events” in our entire history, the whole thing just seems absurd. And that’s because it was a spectacular prophetic failure. Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that no substantial problems resulted from the glitch, and let’s just look at the Y2K version of the Apocalypse fantasy itself.

With the Book of Revelations, we have a very elaborate system of symbols which is meant to guide us through the difficult passage from our world of linear time into a transcendent Kingdom of God. But the Y2K story-system is not as psychologically potent. Why? In the Y2K scenario, we really only have one significant symbolic archetypal figure: the Y2k Bug. It acts as psychopomp, bringing us into the realm of psychological truth, and also simultaneously threatens to throw us into societal chaos. And that’s where the story ends. It doesn’t offer to teach us some greater truth. It doesn’t lead us through the trials to a shining New Jerusalem on the other side. It’s merely a possible catastrophe without also being its antithesis.

The other spiritual problem with the Y2K fantasy was that it was incomplete. The Book of Revelations fantasy makes a point to show us that in order to get to the New Jerusalem, it’s necessary for us to pass through Hell on Earth first. Y2K instead suggested that the only thing we could do was run around and spend money so that we could prevent disaster. In some ways, it’s starting to make a little more sense to me why Rapture-enthusiasts almost seem to openly court the end of the world. It’s because they instinctually understand that for the psychological archetypal Apocalypse fantasy to work, you have to actually go through it. You can’t stop it before it happens, or else you’ll never reap the cathartic benefits of it.

To me, that doesn’t mean we have to necessarily physically act out our Apocalypses in the real world. After all they originate as psychic events. So the best way to act them out is in their own terms, psychologically or ritually.