When my son was nine, he asked, “Dad, when is the end of the world?”
He was studying the myths of the Torah, as is customary for third graders in the Waldorf school curriculum. They were immersed in the story of Noah and the cataclysm of the flood that swept away all living creatures.
My son was also going through what Rudolph Steiner’s model of stages of development calls the nine-year change. This is a time of leaving behind the dreamy and imaginative paradise of early childhood and beginning to feel oneself as an individual. Steiner calls it the Rubicon, crossing a threshold with no possibility of return.
The question wasn’t one of curiosity; rather my son was feeling the imminent end of a world, and the immanent presence of another.
“Why do you ask?” I asked him.
“Because I feel like the end of the world is coming,” he said.
“What does that feel like?” I asked him.
“Like endless emptiness.”
I felt sympathy for the boy, who by ordinary standards would have been classified as depressed. I could also see that feeling the emptiness was precisely what he needed. A few weeks later he emerged into robust and vital enthusiasm as though having shed old skin, with no memory of the darkness he felt earlier.
The end of the world is a perennial concern. Diverse and much-promoted existential threats have come and gone in the 50 years I have been aware of the phenomenon. I have come to see the preoccupation with imminent catastrophe as an externalization of the extinction event that awaits each of us, death.
Concern with cataclysmic events is not about the fate of humanity, destruction of species, or other considerations so vast as to be rendered abstract. Rather the fear is for ourselves, feeling the necessity to develop beyond the stages afforded automatically by nature and continuing an evolution that may only be conscious and intentional.
The step of a personal annihilation—the end of a world (or worldview)—is a recurring theme in spiritual traditions. In this sense, the focus is on an inner event, sometimes referred to as dying before you die. This is a regular refrain in the teachings of Jesus, and expanded by St. John of the Cross, with the terms “dark night of the soul” and “dark night of the spirit.” These deaths of self are, at the same time, a kind of rebirth.
Islamic and Sufi traditions speak of fana or “annihilation” in four stages, a process of letting go of attachment and identification with progressively deeper levels of self. It points to the possibility of relinquishing the illusion of separate self, and opening to a more transpersonal consciousness that lies within. Each of these stages represents a death and rebirth within the span of the life of the body.
Carlos Castaneda gives a similar theme in his telling of the Yaqui shamanic worldview. According to his teacher, or nagual, Don Juan, the whole work of shamanic practice is a preparation to “leap into an abyss” and make a crossing to another mode of life free of preoccupation with self from which there is no possibility of return.
The current dominant religion, which my friend, the Egyptologist John Anthony West called the Cult of Progress, is characterized by inventing technological simulacra of liberation. With every new invention human beings further “transcend” contact with the material and natural world. With transportation, we are relieved of the need to walk; our appliances perform every kind of technical and manual labor; our devices stimulate our imagination and hunger for music and rhythm. Finally, large language models relieve us of the need to think.
The Cult of Progress makes human capabilities and capacities vestigial. Even the possibility of genuine identity and individuality is subsumed into the iPhone and the YouTube. These could be seen as the signs of the senescence of a species. At the same time, it is an imbalanced hunger for transcendence and liberation from denser strata of reality.
Compared to the religious traditions of yore, the current worldview lacks any possibility of rebirth in a more robust “unknown country.” The best we can hope for is uploading our meshwork of associations to a computer and continuing a banal and petty existence for eternity.
The journey to ourselves begins at every moment we make contact with our wish to be. I see that in order to take a step into a larger, more liberated world, I have to make a sacrifice; to let go of something I feel attached to and make room for a new state—even in a single, conscious breath. Exhaling, I let go of everything and become empty. I die to be filled with new life, born again with the next breath.
This article appears in December 2025.
