Free The Long Descent by John Michael Greer Page A

— very often comment on a difference between the ordinary reality of their lives, and the non-ordinary reality that surges into their consciousness. Did the non-ordinary reality come from someone, something, or somewhere outside ordinary existence? Or was it right here, unnoticed, all the time? That’s the difference between transcendence and immanence.
    Most religions that put a great deal of attention into eschatology also have a transcendent concept of the divine; the whole point of the eschaton is that ordinary reality dissolves into the wholly other. Most religions that have an immanent concept of the divine, in turn, either have no eschatology at all, or make the end of the world a recurring event in an endlessly repeated cycle of time. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with their transcendent god and richly detailed eschatologies, fall on one side of the divide. Religions such as Hinduism, with its universes that bud, blossom, and fall through infinite cycles of time, and Shinto, which has no eschatology at all, fall on the other. So does the Druid spirituality I practice, which recognizes the presence of spirit throughout the world of nature and sees spiritual awakening as something that comes to each soul in its own proper time. 5
    Now and then, though, the two patterns collide and cross-fertilize, and the resulting belief systems locate the eschaton as a possibility to be realized within ordinary history, or even the inevitable result of the working out of historical patterns. The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, more than anything else, was responsible for putting this new wrinkle in the old myth. To the founders and early propagandists of modern science, human beings didn’t need to wait for God to bring on the New Jerusalem; it could be built here and now by harnessing the power of human reason to dominate the world of nature. 6 As a newfound faith in progress redefined the past as a tale of the slow triumph of reason over nature, the Western world embraced a paradoxical vision in which history itself brought about an end to history. Focused through thinkers as different as Hegel and Terence McKenna, this way of thinking about history still remains welded into place in the conventional wisdom throughout our society. For people at all points on the cultural spectrum, as a result, the perfect society remains firmly parked in the near future, accessible once the right set of political, social, or spiritual policies are put into place.
    Marxism offers an example familiar to most people nowadays. In Marxist theory, history is determined by changes in the mode of production that unfold in a fixed order, from primitive communism through slavery, feudalism, and capitalism to the proletarian revolution and the everlasting communist Utopia of the future. While all this is wrapped in the jargon of 19th century materialist science, it’s not hard to see the religious underpinnings of the theory, because every element of Marxist theory has an exact equivalent in Christian eschatology. Primitive communism is Eden, the invention of private property is the original sin that causes the Fall. The stages of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism are the various dispensations of sacred history, and so on, right up to the Second Coming of the proletariat, the millennial state of socialism, and the final arrival of communism as a New Jerusalem descending from some dialectical-materialist heaven. Point for point, it’s a rephrasing of Christian myth that replaces the transcendent dimension with forces immanent in ordinary history.
    Over the last three centuries or so, Christianity’s influence on the Western intellect has crumpled beneath the assaults of scientific materialism, but no mythology has yet succeeded in ousting it from its place in the Western imagination. The result has been a flurry of attempts to rehash Christian myth under other, more materialistic names. The mythology of progress itself is