THEORY OF THE END - Volume III: The Fortunate Eon

The third volume of "THEORY OF THE END, Version 2"

A Note

This is the final volume of the improved and expanded edition of Theory of the End, with this entry compiling essays previously named “parts 16 to 21” and ending with the “conclusion” essay. Chapter 11, “The Mechanical Phantom,” is entirely new material, but I believe that it fits well with the other essays here.

If you are new to this series, I suggest starting with either the Introduction or “Volume I: The Future is Canceled.”

With that out of the way, please enjoy.

Chapter 11: The Mechanical Phantom

“We are ghosts of the concrete world,

Genetic codes of a dying breed.

Will I be left behind?

Sounds of a playground fading.”

-In Flames, from “Sounds of a Playground Fading”

“It is a strange fact, and one which appears never to have received proper attention, that the strictly ‘historical’ period… goes back exactly to the sixth century before the Christian era,” writes the French Metaphysician Rene Guenon in his 1927 work “The Crisis of the Modern World.” It is, he states, “as though there were at that point a barrier in time impossible to penetrate by the methods of investigation at the disposal of ordinary research.” He continues:

Indeed, from this time onward there is everywhere a fairly precise and well-established chronology, whereas for everything that occurred prior to it only very vague approximations are usually obtained, and the dates suggested for the same events often vary by several centuries.

This apparent wall has resulted in a shroud of mystery around early human civilization, one which has been seized upon by writers like Graham Hancock, who has spent his career searching for evidence that there existed in that distant time societies far more advanced than we have previously considered. “It must be considered as a reasonable hypothesis,” he writes in his popular 2015 book “Magicians of the Gods,” “that worldwide myths of a golden age brought to an end by flood and fire are true, and that an entire episode of the human story was rubbed out in those 1,200 cataclysmic years between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago — an episode not of unsophisticated hunter-gatherers but of advanced civilization.”

To Hancock, his endeavor is one of human self-discovery, the idea that we could truly know ourselves by looking towards the echoes of the past. “It’s extraordinary to be alive at all. Just to, you know, to be in a human body,” he says in a 2025 YouTube interview on the channel “Before Skool,” continuing: “All of this is a miracle and a mystery that’s wrapped up in the larger mystery of what we are as a species and the origins of human civilization.”

Other thinkers, like the early 20th century Japanese educator Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, have thought of early man as “an extremely powerless and pitiable being” who came into greater control of himself and his environment through the application of technique, culminating in technological modernity. In one of his texts, he quoted the book “Applied Sociology” by the American Sociologist Lester F. Ward, saying: “All applied science is necessarily anthropocentric, Sociology is especially so.” Men like Ward and Makiguchi believed that it was through such scientifically-minded means that man would finally come to a greater understanding of himself, with Ward writing: “Pure sociology is simply a scientific inquiry into the actual condition of society. It alone can yield true social self-consciousness.”

The irony of this proposal is that, despite the vast expansion of “science” and its countless technical applications in our daily lives, humans seem less sure about themselves and their place in the universe than ever before. Our desacralized nature leads not to greater understanding and unity, but towards profound splintering and ultimately atomization. Makiguchi himself realized that something integral was missing from the increasingly irreligious and materialistic outlook of his time, writing back in 1935: “When we speak of religious faith, this may appear as the monopoly of religionists, and thus something that youthful educators wish to distance themselves from, but if we speak of belief, trust, confidence, or conviction, we understand that these form the necessary foundations for daily life.”

Makiguchi, who professed a longstanding “sense of unease, of groping [his] way in the dark,” eventually converted to Buddhism in 1928, when he was nearly sixty years of age. “My lifelong tendency to withdraw into thought disappeared,” he wrote in 1935 regarding his conversion. “My sense of purpose in life steadily expanded in scope and ambition, and I was freed from all fears…” In a 1937 autobiographical piece, he recounted how his religious awakening had led to a realization of his prior work’s deficiency:

In the midst of [writing the book “The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy” (Jpn: Sōka kyōikugaku taikei, 創価教育学大系)] or, rather, as I was just approaching completion after the release of the first volume, through the faith and understanding of the Lotus Sutra I was able to develop, I was astonished to see that the unconscious progress of my thinking corresponded with the teachings of the Sutra. As I continued to advance in this, I came to realize, with an even greater surprise and joy, that the essential core of the Lotus Sutra represents the totality and basis of the Dharma/laws/principles/methods of daily life and that, relative to this, the rational educational methods called for in my value-creating pedagogy are only partial and peripheral. As I examined the matter more closely, I noticed that there was a crucial lapse in the criteria for the judgment of value I had been proposing. Now, for the first time, my ascertainment of good and evil became fully accurate.

It seems that even a man of scientific sensibilities who had believed in the narrative of human progress like Makiguchi could see that the technical drive for rationality and quantitative material focus which characterized the sociology of his time had left it minus something, and it was the ancient wisdom of supreme unity outlined in the Lotus Sutra that filled the gaps with something transcendent. His quest to outline the human conception of “value,” it turned out, could only evolve to its highest form once he went beyond the constraints of modern scientific rationality. In Andrew Gebert’s essay “The Roots of Ambivalence: Makiguchi Tsunesaburo’s Heterodox Discourse and Praxis of ‘Religion,’” he describes the evolution of Makiguchi’s “value-creation” theory as follows:

Makiguchi posited three forms of value: Beauty, Gain, and Good, with the last defined as that which enhances and extends the shared life of humans in community. In his original formulation of this system, Makiguchi assumed that judgments regarding the value of Good could only be made by and within individual societies. This appears to be the “crucial lapse in the criteria for the judgment of value” that came to Makiguchi’s attention through his study of the Lotus Sutra. While Makiguchi does not explicitly indicate the content of this discovery, he clearly celebrates it: “Now, for the first time, my ascertainment of good and evil became fully accurate” (Makiguchi 1981–1988, [1935] 8:411). From the text… it can be seen that the standard of good and evil that became clear to him was one that transcended the contemporaneously prevailing values of his society and, in this sense, aspired to the universal.

“Religion,” if we are to use such a word to describe frameworks like Buddhism (for it can be tricky to define, especially considering man’s current tendency to view it merely as a grouping of societal functions and dynamics), is our primary connection to the remote past, a means to potentially understand what we’ve lost along the way. People pass away and landmarks crumble, worn and weathered by the slow crushing strength of the natural world, yet we can still pick up ancient scriptural texts at the local bookstore and enter into the minds of those who lived long, long ago.

Exactly how much we have lost in our never ending pursuit of “progress,” however, is a matter of much debate. While Makiguchi saw old scriptural texts drenched in mysticism like the Lotus Sutra as holding great importance to understanding the human condition and our place in the cosmos, many of his contemporaries would have disagreed. “Religion is a product of reason,” Lester F. Ward wrote, placing religion as a consequence of primitive fear of the unknown and inconceivable.

To Ward, early man was “in constant terror of dire visitations from malignant spirits,” and had created religion as a technique to ward off invisible dangers; much more a societal function than a supreme truth. “But it soon overstepped the narrow limits of this primordial duty, and began to guide men to the satisfaction of desires which were disconnected with function and even destructive of it.” Both Ward and others influenced by the Positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte thought religion was characteristic of a stage humanity had to pass through and eventually overthrow in favor of new intellectual heights. Similar views still permeate society today, in particular the idea that men of the distant past were characterized by a childlike naivety, their knowledge dwarfed by the average elementary school child of the 21st century. If this indeed be the case, then surely we’ve become a species of supermen, right?

Yet doubts inevitably creep in, fermenting into an oppressive and all-pervading “sense of unease,” just as Makiguchi had described. Man was supposedly freed from the “invisible dangers” of the spirit world, yet he now contends with new intangible horrors in the form of countless mental maladies and increasingly inhuman techniques. Should he drift into unresolvable nihilism or attempt to drop out of society, the onslaught of technique marches on without rest regardless. In his current irreligious phase, man has seemingly forfeited his fate, leaving it to forces outside of his control and understanding; the cold revenge of the supra-rational.

The helplessness modern man feels in the face of this decaying future, or “sense of ending,” combined with the relatively dismissive view of the past elaborated above, has led to him, as Christopher Lasch writes, “losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.” Published in 1979, his book “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” explores this phenomenon and the myriad of effects that stem from it, noting a then-burgeoning fixation on the “self” as the primary characteristic of the new chronologically atomized human. He writes:

Indeed Americans seem to wish to forget not only the sixties, the riots, the new left, the disruptions on college campuses, Vietnam, Watergate, and the Nixon presidency, but their entire collective past, even in the antiseptic form in which it was celebrated during the Bicentennial. Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper, issued in 1973, accurately caught the mood of the seventies. Appropriately cast in the form of a parody of futuristic science fiction, the film finds a great many ways to convey the message that “political solutions don’t work,” as Allen flatly announces at one point. When asked what he believes in, Allen, having ruled out politics, religion, and science, declares: “I believe in sex and death — two experiences that come once in a lifetime.”

To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity.

Like Franco Berardi, Lasch saw the 1970s as the decade where the myth of perpetual human progress had begun to break down. While some of Lasch’s contemporaries suggested the apocalyptic tenor of the time to have a millenarian quality, this was far from the case. “It is the waning of the sense of historical time,” Lasch writes, “that distinguishes the spiritual crisis of the seventies from earlier outbreaks of millenarian religion, to which it bears a superficial resemblance.”

A prominent component of this is a total lack of any notion of a past “golden age” which can be returned to with the re-emergence of a “sleeping king.” When the past is nothing but comparative darkness, there can be no prior golden age. Nor can the future be trusted once the “march of progress” has died and the “end of history” has been rendered nonsensical. Moreover the climate is far more “therapeutic” than religious. “People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age,” Lasch states, “but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.” Even religion is often converted into a form of therapy, as was the case with Buddhism’s Western techniciziation.

In this new desacralized age of pastless and futureless pessimism, man has no choice but to turn inward, displaying a “tendency to withdraw into thought,” as Makiguchi wrote. Man gazes upon the “self” rather than his place in a universe which has become increasingly hostile, and indulges in ephemeral fixations like consumerism, sensory pleasure, and fame as the highest possible achievements. The cosmos is reduced to the size of a pinpoint, filled with only the “individual” and his desires. This, of course, raises the stakes in the fulfillment of said desires, as a “self” only has one chance to be made manifest and be recognized. Lasch explains:

The modern propaganda of commodities and the good life has sanctioned impulse gratification and made it unnecessary for the id to apologize for its wishes or disguise their grandiose proportions. But this same propaganda has made failure and loss unsupportable. When it finally occurs to the new Narcissus that he can “live not only without fame but without self, live and die without ever having had one’s fellows conscious of the microscopic space one occupies upon this planet,” he experiences this discovery not merely as a disappointment but as a shattering blow to his sense of selfhood.

All of this inevitably produces derangement on a societal level, which Lasch characterizes as being in line with the profile of “narcissism.” He lists as a set of associated behaviors: “fear of old age and death, altered sense of time, fascination with celebrity, fear of competition, decline of the play spirit, [and] deteriorating relations between men and women.” This emerged alongside the technically-derived hyperreal inclination of post-industrial civilization, with Lasch noting the increased importance of spectacle and its hyperreal significance all the way back in the 70s:

The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history… Among the “many narcissistic uses” that Sontag attributes to the camera, “self-surveillance” ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self-scrutiny but because it renders the sense of selfhood dependent on the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world.

In order to realize the newly all-important “self,” modern man clings to symbols and signals as proof of his “selfhood.” Virtue becomes something to be displayed, not to be acted out, and politics becomes a matter of “self-expression” and a way to gain recognition among one’s peers rather than a means to improve the lives of one’s fellow citizens. “Even the radicalism of the sixties served, for many of those who embraced it for personal rather than political reasons, not as a substitute religion but as a form of therapy,” Lasch writes. “Radical politics filled empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and purpose.”

Indeed, we saw this come to full fruition in subsequent decades with the technicization of supposedly “radical” left-wing political beliefs; absorbed and reconfigured by the forces of neoliberalism into hollowed-out pseudo-therapeutic consumer lifestyles, much to the ironic delight of self-avowed Leftists who were desperate to regain some semblance of a sense of victory, no matter how empty. Robbed of any coherent unifying theoretical foundation or historical narrative, Leftism is only truly identifiable as a psychological profile, one which becomes more deranged and self-destructive as it is unmoored from all ideological coherence and refocused onto the hyperreal.

The derangement itself is often integrated into the technical milieu and wielded in furtherance of its aims, a phenomenon we often see in modern political activism, yet this state of affairs cannot perpetuate itself in the face of inevitable widespread demoralization and the exhaustion of legacy social infrastructure. It must break down to be reconfigured into new mechanisms, a process I believe to be underway at this very moment. In the meantime, we are experiencing an era of managed decline which we are seemingly unable to address in any meaningful way for fear of damaging the systems and narratives we’ve spent so much time cultivating; dying pseudo-religions lash out as they sink to the dismal realm of Hades, attempting to pull down with them anything within their reach.

We’ve thus been left with a sense of “reality” that is not only devoid of anything sacred and transcendent, but cannot even observe its immediate material circumstances, instead being constantly spirited away into the technological unreal; mere ghosts of the concrete world. Jacques Ellul writes:

When [the average man] leaves his job, his joy in finishing his stint is mixed with dissatisfaction with a work as fruitless as it is incomprehensible and as far from really productive work. At home he “finds himself” again. But what does he find? He finds a phantom. If he ever thinks, his reflections terrify him. Personal destiny is fulfilled only by death; but reflection tells him that for him there has not been anything between his adolescent adventures and his death, no point at which he himself ever made a decision or initiated a change.

However, I would say that even death is rendered hyperreal these days, characterized not by the passing of a life, but by its propagandistic utilizations: “but what does the death say about society?” We can’t even die without our corpse being fed into the cold iron jaws of human technique, digested into a temporary symbol of something or other before expending its usefulness and being swept away with so much other digital detritus.

Man lives neither for divine truth and righteousness, nor necessarily for the betterment of material conditions for his posterity, but for the hyperreal and the furtherance of technique. We have been drawn down not to the most baseline sensory understanding of reality, but to something underneath it; the realm of the mechanical phantom.

But if this is our state of affairs, what alternatives do we have? How did time come to be subjugated, and how exactly did man of the past experience time before the continuum was ripped from him? Most importantly, what role should the ancient wisdom found in religions play in human civilization going forward? Should we continue viewing men of antiquity as naive rubes, or did they really hold something important which was discarded in our quest to attain new technological heights? If we are to go about answering these questions, we must first do away with modern prejudices around the ancient world and try to see things from a very different perspective. In service of this, I will outline several views of time throughout this volume which push against our current shattered understanding.

Chapter 12: The Subjugation of Time

“Money’s flesh.

Money is flesh in your hand.”

-Swans, from “Money is Flesh”

We currently live in an age of growing pessimism. With “the end of history” and “march of progress” narratives now on life support, the future, in the eyes of many, holds untold horrors of steel and smoke, snarling and foaming at the mouth and waiting to be unleashed upon a soft and unprepared populace. What once held so much hope several decades ago has in recent history descended into visions of bloody dystopia. “The future is over,” writes Franco Berardi. “It is not a new idea, as you know: born with punk, the 1970s and ’80s witnessed the beginning of the slow cancellation of the future. Now those bizarre predictions have become true.”

Francis Fukuyama, in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” paraphrased Alexandre Kojeve, stating that “after the rise of the Shogun Hideyoshi in the fifteenth century, Japan experienced a state of internal and external peace for a period of several hundred years which very much resembled Hegel’s postulated end of history.” To Fukuyama and Kojeve, such a time of peace, characterized in the historical record by the many artistic achievements of the era, was a preview of a golden age to come. What Fukuyama fails to mention, however, is that many in the Edo period saw it as an age of decline and, much like we often do now here in the West, frequently looked to the past for answers. One man’s “end of history,” it seems, is often another man’s decadence.

The Zen Master Suzuki Shosan was one of these individuals. His book of sayings records a conversation he had with one of his disciples, who had claimed that the era’s monks had “no interest in The Way.” Shosan replied: “Quite apart from that, not one of them actually leaves the world at all. That’s why if you threw them out of their temples right now they’d all be helpless.” In his eyes, the Buddhist clergy had been drained of all vitality and contented themselves with “skinning the dead” to get by, i.e. merely conducting funerary services in exchange for money. “Still less does anyone work up the grit to sink his teeth into things like a man-eating dog,” he continued. “It’s too bad, it really is.”

The most significant instance of this, however, were the Kokugaku scholars, who generally saw the remote past of Japan as the peak of societal harmony. An example from the prominent scholar Motoori Norinaga can be found in his treatise on ancient poetry entitled “Ashiwake Obune.” Per John R. Bentley’s “Anthology of Kokugaku Scholars”:

Simply because these people lived in the ancient past does not mean that they were all honest, and there were no people who were deceitful to some extent. Even among the ancient people there were many who were full of wickedness, lies, and deception. Even in the present we find that there are some people who are quite sincere and simple, so one cannot make blanket statements about people. However, if you compare the overall characteristics of the ancient past with the present, anyone will notice the change.

Norinaga’s contemporary, Kamo no Mabuchi, had even stronger thoughts on the matter, believing that the ancient Japanese developed no writing system because it was not needed. People were honest and communicated clearly, and what they communicated, they remembered. To appreciate only the eras after Chinese writing was put to use and dismiss the eras before as childish and naive was, to him, like “wishing to scoop up water at the muddied end of the river, hating the upper stream where the water is clear.” He writes in his treatise “Goiko”:

As I have said early on, the original hearts of the Japanese were sincere, so there were few tasks and few words; there was no confusion in speech, and people did not forget what they had once heard. If there was no confusion in communication, and nothing was forgotten in that era, then the ancients should have transmitted their traditions for a long time. Since the hearts of the people were straightforward, there were few edicts from the emperor. And when the court gave an imperial edict, it spread throughout the land like the wind, penetrating the hearts of the people like water.

Since this was the case, heaven caused the population to increase, and there were no mistakes in the orally transmitted traditions. The pure people protected the traditions for many generations, nothing varying. What need did the ancient Japanese have for characters?

But he did not extend this belief to the Japanese alone. In his work entitled “Kokuiko,” he says that “when one reads the words of Laozi, you realize that the hearts of the Chinese originally were sincere. They were sincere like the poetry of the ancient Japanese…” However, later developments would render China an “evil-hearted country,” with their “deep and profound teachings” appearing outwardly reasonable, but working to throw the country “into confusion.”

Mabuchi’s words evoke an image of the past that was “pure” and uncorrupted by the complications of words and philosophies. In the eyes of the Kokugaku scholars, the lives of those in the remote past was characterized by a simple sincerity which required few words to express itself. Humans of later eras, on the other hand, became increasingly enamored with words and pretentious doctrine, and thus required more complexity, regulation, and long-winded philosophy. “False wisdom,” in the belief of men like Mabuchi, had captured men’s hearts and “polluted” their minds.

Whether or not we take this as true is irrelevant for my purposes at the moment. The important point is that it illustrates a view of the past that was seen as very naive and foolish for much of modern history, especially in the Western world, but is now seeing a resurgence as technological advances paint for us a future that looks increasingly less human. It is, in essence, an inversion of the “march of progress” narrative; one which looks to the past longingly rather to a theoretical “end of history.”

A disdain for the Edo period was also shown by the Nichirenist thinkers of the early 20th century, although for a different reason. Despite being a largely Buddhist movement, they saw the Meiji revolution (which had devastated the Buddhist establishment through a wave of widespread iconoclasm) as an extremely positive development, as it shattered the utterly stagnant religious environment of the Edo era and freed Buddhist thought from its secularized and bureaucratized confines. Kishio Satomi writes in his book “Discovery of Japanese Idealism”:

After the death of Nichiren, spiritual Japan had to pass through a lifeless period of monotony and stagnancy for about six hundred years. At the close of this period, the darkness was suddenly pierced by the appearance of the most prominent idealist, the late Emperor Meiji the Great.

In Satomi’s eyes, and those of his father, Chigaku Tanaka, the Meiji era was a step towards realizing Nichiren’s vision of worldwide proliferation of Lotus Sutra Buddhism; the catalyst to an eventual end to the “Latter Age” and period of decrease wherein man experiences the three calamities of war, famine, and pestilence. Satomi explains the Nichirenist interpretation of Nichiren’s writings in his book “Japanese Civilization: Its Significance and Realization” as follows:

According to Nichiren, in the degenerate days of the Latter Law, there is no Buddhist commandment outside of our vow for the reconstruction of the country and the realization of the Heavenly Paradise in the world. Even the so-called virtuous sage, if he does not embrace this great and strong vow, in other words only enjoys virtue individually, such a sage is pretty useless.

To fully comprehend the Buddhist concepts of the Latter Age and period of decrease, however, we must return to the oldest model of time, namely the “cyclical.”

Time, in the eyes of ancient man, was characterized by repetition; day and night, the changing of the seasons, birth and death. Thus the “cycle” was the most natural model of cosmic time. The Aztecs saw their world as being subject to “sun cycles” wherein the sun itself would fall and need to be reborn, while the Hindus saw the cosmos through the lens of a “yuga cycle” consisting of four periods: the Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga. Buddhists as well saw time as a holographic expanse of various cycles of degradation and restoration, but we will discuss that in far more depth in a later chapter.

According to the Marxist thinker Guy Debord, however, the dominance of cyclical time began to slip with the popularization of writing and the creation of historical chronicles. In his view, this nascent “linear” model of time was determined by the masters of the respective societies, thus “history’s” direction was a product of whoever was in charge of the recordings; the “owners” of time. Debord writes:

The chronicle is the expression of the irreversible time of power. It also serves to inspire the continued progression of that time by recording the past out of which it has developed, since this orientation of time tends to collapse with the fall of each particular power and would otherwise sink back into the indifferent oblivion of cyclical time (the only time known to the peasant masses who, during the rise and fall of all the empires and their chronologies, never change).

However, Debord states that it was not until the “monotheistic” religions rose to prominence that linear time was ushered in as a defining fixture of the human experience by establishing a sort of compromise “between the cyclical time that still governed the sphere of production and the irreversible time that was the theater of conflicts and regroupings among different peoples.” These faiths are at least in part defined by an orientation towards a singular future event, which Debord summarizes as “the Kingdom of God is coming” (I want to note here that linear-time is not exclusive to the monotheists, but we will cover that in due time).

The eventual recession of religious thought and rise of industry marked the true solidification of continuous linear time in the form of what Debord calls “the irreversible time of production.” He writes that “the victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom.” History was, in effect, established “as a general movement — a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path.” Yet there is a caveat: most of society, although instilled with an understanding of linear historical time, is “prevented… from using it. ‘Once there was history, but not any more.’”

The last sentence in the quotation above calls to mind Francis Fukuyama’s claims about “the end of history” having been reached with corporatized Liberal Democracy, and such a narrative can indeed be seen as one form which the subjugation of time can take; rendering man a mere spectator of his own overarching history while handing him over to a fractured conception of time, which is overwhelmingly colored by his field of employment. The average worker in America thus sees his perception of time split into work days, weeks, quarters, years, and pay periods, all with different transactional implications; e.g. “annual bonuses,” “vacation time,” “quarterly performance reports,” etc. The economy as a whole too works in business cycles, boom and bust cycles, annual cycles, and so on.

This deranged iteration of cyclical existence feeds into what blogger Paul Skallas calls “the consistency space,” the tendency to strive towards keeping things frozen as they are for as long as possible, stuck in the same “work cycle” indefinitely. He writes in a blog post entitled “The 4-Hour Life”:

… your real job is to be consistent at work. To be reliable. You’re in a domain called the Consistency Space. A domain where messing up could cost you your nice life. It’s not about scoring goals as much as not letting goals into the net. This simple idea influences your life, and the lives of others. It is the single most influential idea around you…

Mondays feel like Mondays, Fridays feel like Fridays, nothing you can do will change that. The structure will dictate how we feel, in a way that grey clouds make us feel slightly more low energy than a sunny day.

When we also take into account the fact that various technical fields can have very different ways of viewing time, for instance accounting and politics (election cycles, tax periods, etc), then what we have overall is a system in which every individual has their own miniature conception of time, often completely separate from those who do not work in the same field or for the same company. Like everything else, time has become atomized and individuated; a “self-time,” if you will, turning one’s view away from the world at large and further inward until he finds it difficult to even communicate with others. How can you relate to someone who resides in a completely different world?

The unifying feature between all of these various “self-times,” of course, is the clock; mechanized time. Man is obsessed with time; constantly running late for this and that and peering towards that infernal machine hanging on his office wall. He is, after all, paid for his time, or rather he sacrifices his time, and thus his life, to make a living; his time is money, and “money is flesh.” There are also entire industries built around wasting people’s time, like advertising. If a man will not willingly trade his attention (i.e. his processing power, “cyber-time”), there are techniques for ripping it away through other means.

Countless individuals, countless information streams, all pour into man at any given time, fighting for a bloody pound of his very finite “cyber-time,” and the pressure strains his entire being. Here we see what can be called “commodified time.”

Like this, time has not only been shattered, but utterly subjugated. Time is differentiated for each person because that is the optimal model of time for technological neoliberal society, feeding into what Jacques Ellul called “the plasticity of the social milieu.” Atomization, more than anything else “conferred on society the greatest possible plasticity — a decisive condition for technique.” The “self-time” I have described is thus a “technicization” of time, broken into countless modular pieces for the benefit of technical furtherance.

With all of this in mind, is it any wonder that the future has become so overwhelmingly bleak? How could it be any other way?

Upon examining the array of frameworks developed for the understanding of time, the early 20th century French philosopher and metaphysician Rene Guenon (who was, as you will find, quite different from Marxists like Debord) saw “cyclic time” as the most accurate by far, writing in his 1945 book “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times” that “time is not something that unrolls itself uniformly, so that the practice of representing it geometrically by a straight line, usual among modern mathematicians, conveys an idea of time that is wholly falsified by over-simplification… The correct representation of time is to be found in the traditional conception of cycles, and this conception obviously involves a ‘qualified’ time.’”

To understand what exactly is meant by the peculiar passage above, we will need to explore the profound and perhaps somewhat disturbing notion that Guenon introduces (or rather re-introduces, if we are to accept that the cyclical view of time is in fact the oldest) in his aforementioned book of time having a “quality” on top of having a “quantity.” Before that, however, we should establish the scope of what is meant by the term “quality.”

Chapter 13: Material and Time (or “The Curse of Prometheus”)

“You’ll hear me now, you demigods…

Either let me go or put me in the dirt.”

-HEALTH, from “Demigods”

The ancient Greek poem “Works and Days,” written by Hesiod and addressed to his brother Perses, dedicates a chapter to describing five different ages, in each of which live a different “race” of man. These can be enumerated as follows:

1. The Golden Age

2. The Silver Age

3. The Bronze Age

4. The Heroic Age

5. The Iron Age

According to Hesiod, the first of these ages was the best, as the golden race was free from toil and strife and “lived like gods without sorrow of heart.” After their passing came the silver race, who was “less noble by far,” although still lived with relatively little sorrow. Hesiod states that this race was “put away” by Zeus because they would “not give honour to the blessed gods who live on Olympus.”

Third came the bronze race, which was “in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong.” The bronze men had “adamantine” hearts and fearsome strength. “Great was their strength and unconquerable the arms which grew from their shoulders.” They also had a taste for violence and war, thus their age was eventually done away with by their own hands and “passed to the house of Hades.”

Next came the race of heroes or “demi-gods,” who were “nobler and more righteous, a god-like race of hero-men… the race before our own.” These men surpassed both of the generations before them, venerating the gods of Olympus while also exuding incredible strength and will. Although some lost their lives to conflict, many survived and eventually retired to “the ends of the Earth” where “they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep swirling Ocean, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year, far from the deathless gods, and Cronos rules over them; for the father of men and gods released him from his bonds.”

In his verses concerning the age in which he and his brother supposedly lived, the altogether inferior “Iron Age,” Hesiod writes the following lament:

Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. But, notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils. And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth.

The father will not agree with his children, nor the children with their father, nor guest with his host, nor comrade with comrade; nor will brother be dear to brother as aforetime. Men will dishonour their parents as they grow quickly old, and will carp at them, chiding them with bitter words, hard-hearted they, not knowing the fear of the gods.

The Iron Age, according to the above account, is characterized by much weariness and suffering; by the shackling of man to his work and the splintering of social relations. Work, in this sense, is the burden of our inferior “race” with which we are forced to constantly contend until our lives are shortened (“for in misery men grow old quickly”) and we are “destroyed.”

“For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life,” Hesiod states.

This in itself is not inconsistent with other beliefs around eons of decline, which were common among ancient civilizations. However, what I find particularly interesting about the framework presented by Hesiod is that four of the five ages are named after metals. They are not necessarily bestowed these titles because the respective metals are the primary materials wielded by the “races” in pursuit of civilizational advance (although this does seem to be the case with both the bronze and iron ages), rather there appears to be a quality assigned to these substances which does not necessarily correlate to their purely physical properties.

After all, it’s said that Prometheus brought work to mankind when he bestowed upon them the power of flame, and there was no application of fire more advanced, and therefore potentially terrifying, than the transformation of metals into the tools of men. In fact, it seems an undeniable tendency for man to become enslaved to the very tools he makes; every technological leap resulting in new and more advanced ways for him to kill and be killed, and new modes of production which, although able to increase productive output several times over, never truly liberate him from his eternal affliction.

Man, in this sense, is destined to the same cruel fate as Prometheus, to forever give over his body in pieces as part of some divine punishment. For Prometheus, it was his liver. For us, it is our time, energy, and health. This goes on for countless ages, repeating itself over and over again, until all energy and will is exhausted and man himself is worn down by his own machinations; victim to his own lofty ambition. As Franz Kafka writes: “Every one grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily…”

It is perhaps due to this perspective that the Greeks did not advance in the realm of technique as much as one may suspect. In “The Technological Society,” Jacques Ellul outlines the distrust the ancient Greeks seemed to have for technological advance, writing:

For one thing, theirs was a conception of life which scorned material needs and the improvement of practical life, discredited manual labor (because of the practice of slavery), held contemplation to be the goal of intellectual activity, refused the use of power, respected natural things. The Greeks were suspicious of technical activity because it represented an aspect of brute force and implied a want of moderation.

But we should not make the mistake of attributing such an attitude to the Greeks alone. Indeed, a distrust of the use of metal in particular was common to ancient peoples, with Rene Guenon making special note of the ancient Hebrews in his book “The Reign of Quantity”:

… from the beginning of the time when the use of stone was allowed in special cases, such as in the building of an altar, it was nevertheless specified that these stones must be ‘whole’, for ‘you shall lift up no iron tool upon them’; according to the precise terms of this passage, insistence is directed not so much to the stone being unworked as to no metal being used on it: the prohibition of the use of metal was thus more especially strict in the case of anything intended to be put to a specifically ritual use. Traces of this prohibition still persisted even when Israel had ceased to be nomadic and had built, or caused to be built, stable edifices…

The Japanese too seemed to hold a certain distrust of metal, which was also associated either with war and work or with religion (it’s worth noting that metalworking advanced significantly in the Asuka period, around the same time as Buddhism’s generally-accepted introduction to the island nation). Thus iron was most heavily associated with farming tools and weapons, while bronze was often used to create sacred objects like mirrors and Buddha icons.

This dual nature of metal is reflected in their mythology as well, with the powerful flame god Hi no Kagutsuchi depicted as a deity of both creation and destruction. When he was dismembered by his father, Izanagi no Mikoto, his blood droplets instantly brought forth other deities, including the important martial god of blades and thunder, Takemikazuchi, also known as the God of Kashima.

However, his birth resulted in the death of his mother, Izanami no Mikoto, who descended to the underworld where her still-animated corpse gave birth to demons. Here we can see the “equal and opposite” nature of creation at play. Prometheus brought humans fire and work, while Izanami no Mikoto brought creation and destruction, both blossoming forth in a wreath of terrible flame. Make no mistake, the curses bestowed onto us by Prometheus and through Kagutsuchi continue to this day.

[Note: I discuss Hi no Kagutsuchi in the second chapter of my work “The Mad Laughing God,” which you can read in the appendix.]

It is also a severely underexamined fact that the syncretic Japanese deity known as “Konjin” is a god of metals. Transmitted via the Taoism-adjacent doctrines and practices of Onmyodo during the Heian era, Konjin was considered to be an itinerant deity, i.e. one who would be associated with different directions over time, thus lending the particular directions he occupied a sinister quality that could cause misfortune. It can be observed here that it was not just the element that the Onmyoji considered to have non-observable quality, but “space” as well, and this quality would change with the gradual shifting of the stars and planets.

The effects of Konjin’s occupation were strongest when he was in either of the “demon gates,” which are in the Northeastern and Southeastern directions. These directions were (and sometimes still are) considered fairly inauspicious regardless of which deity occupied them, and even today you can still find small guardian icons adorning shrine and temple buildings on their northeastern corners.

Why exactly the god of metals was considered so fearsome among the itinerant gods in Onmyodo is not exactly clear to me, but it is worth mentioning that another notorious directional god named Daishogun (literally “Great General”) was associated with the planet Venus along with Konjin, a detail which may be a clue to unraveling the mystery. Planetary spirits being linked to metals is, according to Rene Guenon, nothing new. He writes in “The Reign of Quantity”:

… it must be remembered in the first place that the metals, by reason of their astral correspondences, are in a certain sense the ‘planets of the lower world’; naturally therefore they must have, like the planets themselves, of which they can be said to receive and to condense the influences in the terrestrial environment, a ‘benefic’ aspect and a ‘malefic’ aspect.”

Indeed, we see this as a recurring theme in both Chinese and Japanese iterations of Taoism and in Western alchemical frameworks, and should it be too surprising when we consider the metallic composition of meteorites? There are also tales in the Nihon Shoki and passed down through Omika Shrine tradition of the chaotic deity Amatsu Mikaboshi, who was subjugated by the aforementioned martial god Takemikazuchi and two others. It’s claimed by Omika Shrine that part of Amatsu Mikaboshi’s soul then fell to Earth to be sealed away in a stone currently located on their grounds.

Regardless, it’s clear that there is a certain alien quality attributed to metals that isn’t prominent for any other conventional building material, one which transcends the mere sensory qualities with which modern scientific measurement concerns itself. Guenon posits a potential civilizational source for this understanding: At the dawn of humanity, the primary modes of living were nomadic and agricultural, a duality we can see reflected in the biblical story of the brothers Cain and Abel. Nomadic societies like the very early Hebrews rarely used stone due to the necessity of mobility, while those who took up agriculture utilized stone to a more significant degree (but, of course, no metals until later eras). Life in a “town” represents a more advanced form of agricultural society, one that uses stone far more than the two previously mentioned lifestyles. Guenon writes:

… minerals, in their commonest form, that of stone, are principally used in the construction of stable buildings; a town, considered as the collectivity of the buildings of which it is made up, appears in particular as something like an artificial agglomeration of minerals; and it must be reiterated that life in towns represents a more complete sedentarism than does agricultural life, just as the mineral is more fixed and more ‘solid’ than the vegetable.

In this narrative we can witness what Guenon would call the “solidification” of human life, one which roots it into a more fixed and materially-focused mode of existence, something that he considers a “downward movement” towards a lower level. Indeed, we can see this at play in the Buddhist five-level pagodas of Japan, which are composed of five shapes representing both the five esoteric Buddhas and the five elements:

• Jewel - Space

• Half-circle - Air

• Pyramid - Fire

• Sphere - Water

• Cube - Earth

The two extremes of the above framework, space and earth, are embodied in Mahayana mythology in the brothers Ksitigarbha (literally “Earth Matrix”) Bodhisattva and Akasagarbha (“Space Matrix”) Bodhisattva. Ksitigarbha is portrayed as a purely compassionate being who descends to the deepest and darkest depths of hell in order to bring the sinners suffering there back up to the higher realms, while his counterpart, Akasagarbha, oversees the Buddhist practitioners and sages looking to transcend their material existence and seek out supreme realization of ultimate reality (it is, in fact, he who Japanese Mahayanist monks have historically been asked to confess their misdeeds to). The “upward” movement implied here is quite apparent.

It’s logical that the most stable, or “solid,” of the above elements would occupy the bottom slot in the five-shape pagoda, while the least solid, namely “space,” that which most accurately illustrates Buddhist notions of “emptiness,” would be at the very top. Something which may be apparent by now is that metal is entirely absent from this formulation, although it is likely included within the “Earth” segment by default. Should it be rendered separate, however, it would likely be further underneath.

[Note: Metals, most notably iron, are very often referenced in description of Buddhist hells, with a very prominent example being Ksitigarbha’s description of Avici, or “Relentless/Incessant Hell,” in the “Original Vows of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva Sutra,” an excerpt from which is reproduced below:

In regard to the Incessant Hell, this city of hells is more than eighty thousand li in perimeter. The city walls are made entirely of iron, ten thousand li in height. Atop these walls the mass of fire leaves hardly a gap. Within this city of hells, the various hells are interconnected, each with a different name. There is just one hell named Incessant. It is eighteen thousand li in perimeter. Its hell walls are a thousand li in height, all made of iron, and with flames at the top reaching to the bottom and flames at the bottom reaching to the top. Iron snakes and iron dogs spew fire and rush here and there in pursuit atop these hell walls.

The significance of metal’s prominence in the low reaches of Buddhist hell is something I have not seen explained by any of the Buddhist writings I have examined. Perhaps it is yet to be made clear through the developments of human civilization, placed in the texts in anticipation of a far later age. Some food for thought.]

It should be stated that the Buddhists considered none of the elements inferior to the others, despite their placement in the memetic frameworks covered thus far, but they were still endowed with their own qualities which extended beyond their mere physical properties. We already know that the way in which we construct our tools has profound material effects on all other areas of life. Should we be so bold as to expect that changing the materials from which our civilizations are constructed wouldn’t also affect us in less tangible (one could say “spiritual”) ways?

We can already recall all of the ways in which our lives have been guided by the material consequences of metallic domination: the rise of the machine and subsequent usurping of the throne by its offspring “technique,” the dramatic increase in production of consumer goods and thus development of Consumerism and its “consumption-based identities,” and ultimately the mass desacralization of society. However, even metal seems to be on its way out as the material of choice for humanity, replaced by even more alien substances.

Plastic, a now ubiquitous material for consumer goods, has become a symbol of artificiality in the minds of many. It is not found in nature, but concocted in laboratories and factories, and it does not degrade like more natural materials do. Yet it is also cheap and plentiful, so plentiful that we have no idea how to get rid of it when the need arises, and it now accumulates in our bodies, altering our chemistry in ways that we have yet to fathom. What the spiritual qualities could be of such a substance is anyone’s guess, but I highly doubt they would be “benefic.”

Just as impactful is the rise of the digital, which is the next step in the societal utilization (or one could say “technicization”) of metal. While not tangible in the same way as the four/five elements of Japanese spirituality expounded above, we can see that it does have intangible qualities of its own which are currently wrecking havoc on modernity. For instance, it’s no longer a secret that the digital tends towards monopolization, just as “technique” does in general.

Because of this, we have been steadily moving towards a form of technological economic feudalism as a replacement for the more conventional “Capitalism,” inextricably intertwining the technological oligarchy with the governments. If you want to even start a tech company, it’s inevitable that you will deal with “big tech” and its utter stranglehold over the technological sphere, “renting” digital spaces from them and buying their countless digital goods and services. Many small companies even end up getting purchased by the “big tech” companies as a way to further stifle any burgeoning competition and solidify their monopolistic reign.

The digital has invaded our homes in the form of cameras and “home assistants,” as well as our minds through the many forms of entertainment media and advertising. It spies on our personal lives through social media posts and advanced information-gathering techniques, and psychologically analyzes us to the utmost degree through its inscrutable algorithms. With the advent of LLMs and other forms of generative artificial intelligence, it also may conquer the “spiritual,” but we will explore that in more detail in a later chapter.

Sure, it may be possible to retreat from the technological onslaught to a certain extent, but human civilization and even the very face of the Earth have changed so significantly in accordance with the wild winds of technique and the machine that a complete purposeful regression is impossible. “For example, consider motorized transport,” Theodore Kaczynski writes in his manifesto, “Industrial Society and its Future.” He continues:

A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace. One’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price.

Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway.

Here, the principles we’ve discussed come into clear view. What was once meant to liberate man has instead rendered him a slave to that previously promised liberation. He hammers iron and bends it to his will, only to find after the fact that he has forged his own chains, and now wears them in perpetuity. Such is his curse, which manifests itself time and time again as the ages pass, in accordance with the materials he wields in service of his whims. Is it any wonder that a man like Kaczynski eventually cracked under the weight of this grim realization, just as many men before him surely have?

Considering all we have covered here, it’s overwhelmingly evident that different substances can be considered to have different “qualities,” whether you want to take into account just the material aspects or the spiritual as well (which you certainly should, for reasons which will become abundantly clear later). If we accept this as true, then we can move on to the next step and apply the same principle to the element of “time.”

Chapter 14: The Quality of Time (and its Dissolution)

“It’s always out there, just past the 7-11, around the cloverleaf… the darkness that waits for me. Can’t see it unless I turn away. It’s not there when I don’t look. Waits for me to come back. Waits for me to come sink in. Just waiting…”

-Information Society, from “Closing In”

The end of the 19th century saw theoretical physics enter into a moment of crisis around the properties of light. One of the men responsible was James Clerk Maxwell, who believed, along with other scientific thinkers of the 19th century, that light waves were propagated through some kind of material ether. However, as Thomas Samuel Kuhn writes in his book on “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Maxwell’s own electromagnetic theory of light “gave no account at all of a medium able to support light waves, and it clearly made such an account harder to provide than it had seemed before.”

Maxwell’s theory was initially met with skepticism for this reason, but as it proved proficient in its predictive abilities, it “achieved the status of a paradigm” and “the community’s attitude toward it changed.” Yet the problem of the ethereal component still remained a thorn in the side of theoreticians. Kuhn continues:

The years after 1890 therefore witnessed a long series of attempts, both experimental and theoretical, to detect motion with respect to the ether and to work ether drag into Maxwell’s theory. The former were uniformly unsuccessful…

The puzzle remained unsolved until the introduction of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in 1905, which rendered the ether aspect to light’s travel unnecessary and dramatically changed the way physicists saw both space and time (now collectively called “spacetime”), recontextualizing them as “relative,” i.e. they would act differently depending on the mass, positioning, and velocity of the bodies in question. Bodies “warp” or “curve” spacetime, causing gravity (and therefore movement) as well as a shift in the way light is observed and time is experienced.

The last of the above effects is perhaps the most difficult to wrap one’s head around, as it implies that time itself changes depending on a body’s speed or the strength of gravitational force acting upon it slowing down with the increase of either. As one would expect, scientists eventually put this theory to the test when they had devised the means to do so, with one such effort now called the “Hafele-Keating experiment.”

In 1971, Joseph Hafele and Richard Keating, intent on exploring this supposed “clock paradox,” placed four atomic clocks onto regularly scheduled commercial airplane flights. The general concept behind the experiment was simple: first they would fly the clocks around the world in the Eastern direction, the direction of the Earth’s rotation, and measure the change in time against the stationary clocks at the United States Naval Observatory. Next, they would repeat the process, but instead fly the clocks Westward, against the Earth’s rotation. A 1971 Time Magazine article on the experiment, entitled “A Question of Time,” recounts the theory behind it as follows:

The paradox, which stems from Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, is difficult for the layman to comprehend and even harder for scientists to prove. It means that time itself is different for a speeding automobile, for example, than for one parked at the curb. The natural vibrations of the atoms in the engine of the moving auto, the movement of the clock on the dashboard and even the aging of the passengers occur more slowly than they do in the parked car. These changes are imperceptible at low terrestrial speeds, however, and according to the theory become significant only when the velocity of the moving object approaches the speed of light.

According to the paper study eventually published in the journal “Science,” the results of the airplane experiment were “in good agreement with predictions of conventional relativity theory.” It continues:

Relative to the atomic time scale of the U.S. Naval Observatory, the flying clocks lost 59±10 nanoseconds during the eastward trip and gained 273±7 nanoseconds during the westward trip, where the errors are the corresponding standard deviations. These results provide an unambiguous empirical resolution of the famous clock “paradox” with macroscopic clocks.

Indeed, it appears that, just as Einstein had predicted, time was relative depending on the conditions, or one could say “quality,” of the fabric of spacetime. Considering this startling discovery, what else could there be to learn about time? Could there perhaps be other “qualities” which we are overlooking due to a collective lack of perceptive ability? The French metaphysician Rene Guenon would say “yes.”

If we accept the circular model of time, as discussed in previous chapters, as well as the notion that time is relative, then the logical conclusion is that time itself could potentially change in quality depending on one’s position in a cosmic macrocycle. “According to the different phases of the cycle,” Guenon writes, “sequences of events comparable one to another do not occupy quantitatively equal durations.” This essentially means that the last phases of a cosmic cycle would unfold with higher rapidity. Guenon elaborates using Hindu doctrine as his example of choice:

… this is particularly evident in the case of the great cycles, applicable both to the cosmic and to the human orders, the most notable example being furnished by the decreasing lengths of the respective durations of the four Yugas that together make up a Manvantara. For that very reason, events are being unfolded nowadays with a speed unexampled in the earlier ages, and this speed goes on increasing and will continue to increase up to the end of the cycle…

The above-mentioned decrease in lengths for subsequent cycles is described in a footnote as “known to be proportionate to the numbers 4, 3, 2, 1,” meaning that the first part of the “yuga cycle” is four times longer than the last (the “Kali Yuga,” in which we are said to currently reside). This is not an instant shift, of course, rather it is an effect that Guenon believes to unfold gradually, like “the movement of a mobile body running down a slope and going faster as it approaches the bottom.”

In this illustration, what the “mobile body” is theoretically retreating from at the top of the hill is termed the “principal unity” by Guenon, and can be conceived of as the ultimate source which all traditional spiritual pursuits strive to realize, thus the cycle is characterized as a downward movement away from a supreme primordial unity. This movement terminates at the furthest point, when time has been condensed into a single moment, and the process rectifies itself instantaneously; a sudden “inversion of the poles,” like an hourglass being flipped over.

We can craft another illustration of Geunonian cyclical time using the Theory of Relativity as a guide by picturing a circle with the “principal unity” (PU) occupying the top end. The four divisions of the yuga cycle would be represented by the first half of the circle, while the instantaneous correction is represented by the second half. Thus the end of the cycle would actually occur at the point furthest from the principal unity, time speeding up as the cosmic location drifts away from what can be viewed as the spiritual gravitational pull of the principal unity.

It must be clarified, however, that this is not an objective description of how this metaphysical process works, but rather a visual model for understanding the principles that Guenon laid out in his text. The truth is that we cannot fully comprehend exactly how it works due in large part to modern man’s severed connection to the supra-sensory realms. In fact, the effects of this quantum shift have gone largely unnoticed by us. That does not mean, of course, that we do not experience them.

One potential ramification of the phenomenon that Guenon cites is the faster passing of life: “human life itself is moreover well known to be considered as growing shorter from one age to another,” he writes, “which amounts to saying that life passes by with ever-increasing rapidity from the beginning to the end of a cycle.” In this sense, it is not that we are living for fewer years, but that the years themselves are exhausting themselves faster. This is also reflected in noticeable behaviors that are usually blamed on more material or sociological factors. Guenon states:

It is sometimes said, doubtless without any understanding of the real reason, that today men live faster than in the past, and this is literally true; the haste with which the moderns characteristically approach everything they do being ultimately only a consequence of the confused impressions they experience.

This is far from the only observable social phenomenon, however, with the most notable being what Guenon calls “the reign of quantity.” It can be described as an almost obsessive preoccupation with boiling all things down to their “quantity” to the detriment of their “quality,” not only in the realm of material goods (standardization and lowering of artisanal quality), but in the way we view the world around us. This is very pronounced in the realm of science (and, by extension, “Scientism”), which is by nature quantitative due to the ever-present necessity of scientific measurement, but is, of course, not limited to that field, as Guenon explains:

This tendency is most marked in the ‘scientific’ conceptions of recent centuries; but it is almost as conspicuous in other domains, notably in that of social organization — so much so that, with one reservation the nature and necessity of which will appear hereafter, our period could almost be defined as being essentially and primarily the ‘reign of quantity’. This characteristic is chosen in preference to any other, not solely nor even principally because it is one of the most evident and least contestable, but above all because of its truly fundamental nature, for reduction to the quantitative is strictly in conformity with the conditions of the cyclic phase at which humanity has now arrived…

What I found particularly interesting about this description is how much it overlaps with what Jacques Ellul had written about in his book “The Technological Society.” The similarity is effectively summarized in a brief passage which reads: “it might be said that technique is the translation into action of man’s concern to master things by means of reason, to account for what is subconscious, make quantitative what is qualitative, make clear and precise the outlines of nature, take hold of chaos and put order into it.” An example of this principle in action is public opinion analysis, regarding which Ellul states:

This system brings into the statistical realm measures of things hitherto unmeasurable. It effects a separation of what is measurable from what is not. Whatever cannot be expressed numerically is to be eliminated from the ensemble, either because it eludes numeration or because it is quantitatively negligible. We have, therefore, a procedure for the elimination of aberrant opinions which is essential to the understanding of the development of this technique. The elimination does not originate in the technique itself. But the investigators who utilize its results are led to it of necessity. No activity can embrace the whole complexity of reality except as a given method permits. For this reason, this elimination procedure is found whenever the results of opinion probings are employed in political economy.

This is, in my opinion, a great illustration, as it shows quite clearly the limitations of the type of quantitative analysis which our modern civilization gravitates towards, and this same tendency towards uniformity can be observed in countless areas, from psychology, to statistics, to sociology, to economics, to political theory. As we witness the flourishing of the global economy and its deterritorializing and reterritorializing effects (which manifest as the sweeping artificial commodified replacement of all prior paths towards meaning and identity), we can see a tendency towards uniformity overtake our very minds as well.

“Technique, to be used, does not require a ‘civilized’ man,” Ellul states. “Technique, whatever hand uses it, produces its effect more or less totally in proportion to the individual’s more or less total absorption in it.” What this means is that the reign of efficiency, and therefore the domination of quality by quantity, can only result in the eventual “technicization” or “mechanization” of mankind itself. And this is exactly what is happening, as Rene Guenon writes:

The conclusion that emerges clearly from all this is that uniformity, in order that it may be possible, presupposes beings deprived of all qualities and reduced to nothing more than simple numerical ‘units’; also that no such uniformity is ever in fact realizable, while the result of all the efforts made to realize it, notably in the human domain, can only be to rob beings more or less completely of their proper qualities, thus turning them into something as nearly as possible like mere machines; and machines, the typical product of the modern world, are the very things that represent, in the highest degree attained up till now, the predominance of quantity over quality.

There is a sort of irony in all of this, specifically the idea that, as man retreats from what Guenon calls “the principle unity,” that great spiritual center from which all existence emanates, he “unifies” himself in a very mechanical, artificial way. It is almost a mockery of the kind of unity that more spiritual men of the past desperately sought, one which occupies a decidedly lower stratum of existence. Guenon calls this seemingly paradoxical, but ultimately logical, phenomenon “uniformity against unity.” He continues:

The consequence, paradoxical only in appearance, is that to the extent that more uniformity is imposed on it, the world is by so much the less ‘unified’ in the real sense of the word. This is really quite natural, since the direction in which it is dragged is, as explained already, that in which ‘separativity’ becomes more and more accentuated; and here the character of ‘parody’, so often met with in everything that is specifically modern, makes its appearance.

It must be emphasized that numbers, despite being “uniform,” are not “unified,” rather they are separate by nature. Modern man, as a component of his complete desacralization, is molded from birth by the numerical in the form of finances, science, psychological evaluation, algorithms, governmental policy, demographic profiling, etc… thus we are stricken with a profound atomization, despite being surrounded by other humans and despite all of the technology which was intended to link us together. Always together, yet forever alone.

This is further exacerbated by the prevalence of philosophies like Rationalism, which is individualistic in that it denies “everything that is of a supra-individual order” and tasks its adherents with formulating a “rational” worldview through their own power. As Gueonon states: “rationalism and individualism are thus so closely linked together that they are usually confused.” It promotes a fallacious view of human homogeneity by presuming that the “reason” of all human beings works identically while also reinforcing the idea that the onus for moral understanding rests solely on the reason of the individual. This creates the misunderstanding held by so-called “rational” thinkers that people from radically different times and places mentally operate in the same manner they do. Guenon elaborates as follows:

Human nature is of course present in its entirety in every individual, but it is manifested there in very diverse ways, according to the inherent qualities belonging to each individual; in each the inherent qualities are united with the specific nature so as to constitute the integrality of their essence; to think otherwise would be to think that human individuals are all alike and scarcely differ among themselves otherwise than solo numero.

The inevitable consequence of the “reign of quantity” discussed in this chapter is the complete shackling of the man to the realm of the sensory and material, severing him from the subtle influences of higher states of being. “… never have either the world or man been so shrunken,” writes Guenon, “to the point of their being reduced to mere corporeal entities, deprived, by hypothesis, of the smallest possibility of communication with any other order of reality!” The universe as we know it becomes smaller and smaller, while time accelerates until reality is unrecognizable; the unfathomably expansive world system of Mt. Sumeru shrinks to the size of a phone screen.

This in itself is a dreadful thought. Indeed, modern man’s distance from men of the remote past is already extremely wide if we limit ourselves to the current conventional modes of analysis like psychology and materialism, a fact that has led to us so quickly labeling the men of prior ages “naive,” “childish,” and “superstitious” for their vastly different worldviews. If we accept the idea that our very perceptive abilities have been limited by the constraints of the modern condition, the gulf widens to an absolutely staggering degree.

Thus we arrive at the disturbing and very real possibility that subtle forces we can’t sense or comprehend are influencing us in undetectable ways, whether these forces are benevolent or, more likely, malevolent; of a lower plane of existence than even our material one. “It can be said with truth that certain aspects of reality conceal themselves from anyone who looks upon reality from a profane and materialistic point of view,” Guenon writes. “They become inaccessible to his observation.” He continues:

... this is not a more or less ‘picturesque’ manner of speaking, as some people might be tempted to think, but is the simple and direct statement of a fact, just as it is a fact that animals flee spontaneously and instinctively from the presence of anyone who evinces a hostile attitude toward them. That is why there are some things that can never be grasped by men of learning who are materialists or positivists, and this naturally further confirms their belief in the validity of their conceptions by seeming to afford a sort of negative proof of them, whereas it is really neither more nor less than a direct effect of the conceptions themselves.

Thus modern man makes the fatal mistake of believing that the infernal shadow of malefic subtle influence does not exist as long as he does not observe it. “It’s not there when I don’t look.” Yet these are the exact conditions necessary for such a force to overtake the material world, plunging it into a darkness that we can’t even begin to comprehend.

However, there is another aspect to this that must be addressed, that being the aforementioned final “correction” proposed by Guenon in his exposition of the cosmic macrocycle. In service of this, Guenon offers monetary policy as a helpful analogy. Stripped of any higher quality which may have limited the abuse of currency, or as Guenon says “the guarantee of a superior order,” what we see is its continual devaluation:

… it has seen its own actual quantitative value, or what is called in the jargon of the economists its ‘purchasing power’, becoming ceaselessly less and less, so that it can be imagined that, when it arrives at a limit that is getting ever nearer, it will have lost every justification for its existence, even all merely ‘practical’ or ‘material’ justification, and that it will disappear of itself, so to speak, from human existence…

… the real goal of the tendency that is dragging men and things toward pure quantity can only be the final dissolution of the present world.

What’s notable about this is that, like most traditional models of time, it presents a view that is fundamentally the opposite of the progressive narrative that has held Western civilization under its heel for so long. Indeed, such opposition is a key factor in Guenon’s understanding of Traditionalism. As for the aforementioned “dissolution,” however, exactly how it may play itself out will be explored in a later chapter, but I should make it clear here that I do not share the pessimism of Rene Guenon regarding this issue, even if our views do overlap to a certain extent.

In fact, as a Buddhist, I am basically obligated to diverge from his belief in a closely looming end stage of humanity, as the Buddhist understanding of time and cycles (although it indeed shares some features with the Guenonian model) differs to a significant degree. In the next couple of essays, I will outline the relevant differences using both a historical and eschatological analysis of Buddhist scripture.

Chapter 15: The Age of Conflict

“For some time now I have known that this nation is destined for destruction.”

-Nichiren

Returning to the topic at the very beginning of this series: Why exactly did General Ishiwara Kanji, well before the onset of World War 2, believe that Japan was destined for a devastating “final war” with the West?

American retellings of his story may briefly mention his faith in Nichiren Buddhism as a motivating factor, but none I have come across have gone into detail on this part of his ideology. This is not at all surprising, as even a basic understanding of it requires a level of knowledge in Nichiren’s writings and Buddhist scripture that would be unreasonable to expect from your typical Western war historian. Let us rectify this matter and dig a bit deeper.

One of the more prominent features of Nichiren’s writing differentiating him from the other East Asian Buddhist patriarchs is his focus on prophecy. Most notable for our purposes are Shakyamuni Buddha’s (the “historical” Buddha, as modern scholars occasionally refer to him) predictions around a period of time called “The Latter Age” or “The Age of Decline of the Dharma.” There are several formulations on when exactly this age is supposed to begin, but the scriptural passage considered the most authoritative by Nichiren and many of his Kamakura-era contemporaries was from the Moon Matrix section of the “Great Collection Sutra.” I will reproduce it below (taken from Robert F. Rhodes’ translation of “Saicho’s Mappo Tomyoki: The Candle of the Latter Dharma”):

After my nirvana, in the first five hundred years, the various bhikyus and others will be within my True Dharma, and their liberation will be firm. In the next 500 years, their dhyana will be firm. In the next 500 years, their listening to many teachings will be firm. In the next 500 years, their construction of temples will be firm. In the last 500 years, strifes and disputes will be firm, and the Pure Dharma will completely disappear.”

In his major work “The Selection of the Time,” Nichiren clarifies this passage as follows:

In the Great Collection Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha, the World-Honored One of Great Enlightenment, addresses Bodhisattva Moon Storehouse and predicts the future. Thus he says that the first five hundred years after his passing will be the age of attaining liberation, and the next five hundred years, the age of meditation (making one thousand years). The next five hundred years will be the age of reading, reciting, and listening, and the next five hundred years, the age of building temples and stupas (making two thousand years). In the next five hundred years, “quarrels and disputes will arise among the adherents to my teachings, and the pure Law will become obscured and lost.”

The first two of these periods make up what is sometimes called “Former Day of the Law” or “Former Age,” with the second pair making up the “Middle Day” or “Middle Age.” The fifth and final five-hundred year period marks the beginning of the Latter Age (the total duration after Shakyamuni’s death covered in this formulation being 2,500 years).

After this timeframe has elapsed, the world will remain in the Latter Age (thought to last around 10,000 years in total) until humanity arrives at the period in which lifespan will begin to increase, which will in turn be punctuated by the coming of the next fully-enlightened Buddha, Maitreya, 5,670,000,000 years from now. We can therefore organize this framework as follows:

1. Shakyamuni’s life

2. The Former Age

   1. The Age of Attaining Liberation (500 years)

   2. The Age of Meditation (500 years)

3. The Middle Age

   1. The Age of Reading, Reciting, and Listening (500 years)

   2. The Age of Building Temples and Stupas (500 years)

4. The Latter Age

   1. The Age of Conflict (500 years)

   2. The remaining 9,500 years (you are here)

5. The “Period of Increase”

6. The coming of Maitreya

[Note: We will cover the final two periods here in more depth in the next chapter.]

The patriarch of Japan’s Tendai school, Saicho, claimed that men’s very faculties would be different in each of these ages, which posed a certain problem for Buddhism. “How can beings of different capacities be saved in the same way?” he asks in his treatise “Mappo Tomyoki.” Several monks in the Kamakura period followed Saicho’s exposition on the Latter Day to very different conclusions.

The Pure Land (Jodo) schools saw devotion to Amitabha (Amida) Buddha and aspiration to be reborn in his Pure Land as the proper teaching for the Latter Age. Nichiren, on the other hand, scrutinized the many Buddhist scriptural texts closely and arrived at the Lotus Sutra as the true path forward, with the text itself describing Shakyamuni Buddha entrusting the teachings to a group of bodhisattvas who lived beneath the earth to “single-mindedly propagate this Law abroad, causing its benefits to spread far and wide” in the future.

Many of the Buddha’s prophecies, however, worried Nichiren immensely. Recounted in several sutras, namely the Medicine Buddha, Golden Light, Benevolent King, and Great Collection Sutras, were warnings of various calamities like plagues, famines, bizarre astrological events, uprisings in the nation, and invasion from foreign lands, all of which would occur should a ruler reject the correct doctrine (which, in Nichiren’s thought, was the one expounded in The Lotus Sutra).

Nichiren witnessed many of these disasters during his life and, as we have covered in an earlier chapter, saw the Jokyu War, which happened just before his birth, as a particularly foreboding development for his country. But it was the prediction of invasion from foreign lands which had him most concerned, as it had yet to transpire. “For some time now I have known that this nation is destined for destruction,” he wrote in a 1275 letter to a lay priest named Takahashi Rokuro Hyoe. Below are some passages from his major work entitled “On Repaying Debts of Gratitude” which quote some of the scriptural texts referenced above:

The Sovereign Kings Sutra says, “Because evil people are respected and favored and good people are subjected to punishment, marauders will appear from other regions, and the people of the country will meet with death and disorder.”

The Great Collection Sutra states: “There may perhaps be various kings of the Kshatriya class who act in a way contrary to the Law, causing anguish to the voice-hearer disciples of the World-Honored One. Perhaps they may curse and revile them or beat and injure them with swords and staves, or deprive them of their robes and begging bowls and the other things they need. Or perhaps they may restrain and persecute those who give alms to the disciples. If there should be those who do such things, then we will see to it that their enemies in foreign lands rise up suddenly of their own accord and march against them, and we will cause uprisings to break out within their states. We will bring about pestilence and famine, unseasonable winds and rains, and contention, wrangling, [and slander]. And we will make certain that those rulers do not last for long, but that their nations are brought to destruction.”

Nichiren himself had believed that the imminent Mongol invasion would fulfill this prediction, and this would further fuel his desire to remonstrate against the government and popular Buddhist schools of his time. For his efforts, he was rewarded by the Kamakura government with two different periods of exile and several attempts on his life. In the biographical text “Nichiren: The Buddhist Prophet” by Masaharu Anesaki, he describes Nichiren’s stance on these matters as follows:

During this crisis, especially in the year 1275, Nichiren wrote several essays on the future of Japan, explaining also his own attitude toward her perils. The most methodical of them is one entitled “Sen-ji-Sho,” the “Selection of the Times” [Works, p. 1189-1250]. After reviewing the phases of Buddhist history since Buddha’s death, he affirms again the conviction he had often expressed before, that his time was the most significant age in the propagation of Buddhism, being the fated fifth five hundred years, in which, as Buddha predicted, a decisive conflict was to take place between the true Buddhism and its opponents.

The persecutions heaped upon the prophet, as well as the various calamities that befell the nation, were the signs of the crisis when decision must be made between the truth and falsehood, between the prophet and his malignant opponents. To all this Nichiren had borne witness, and now the greatest of the signs, the Mongol peril, heralded the final conflict, to be followed by a miraculous, or rather inevitable, conversion of the whole nation. In other words, the imminent peril was regarded as one of the preparatory steps to the establishment of the Holy See in Japan.

Yet, as the story goes, the Mongol invaders were miraculously dashed upon the rocky shores by a sudden raging tempest before they could disembark, annihilating along with them all of Nichiren’s predictions. However, as Anesaki writes, this would inadvertently sow the seeds of a misfortune to be reaped by those of a later era:

In reality, the defeat of the invaders was of momentous consequence; most of the soldiers were drowned… The people rejoiced, and the priests gloried in their achievements in prayer; but Nichiren looked at the event with a cool aloofness, probably thinking how remote the fulfilment of his ideal was. He still insisted that the nation could not really be saved, except by complete conversion.

Nichiren may have been mistaken, if he thought that the success of an invasion by the Mongols would prove the truth of his predictions; but he was certainly right in not being elated by the victory. He was far-sighted enough to recognize that the curse that rested on the nation was a long way from being removed by the defeat of the Mongols. Historians know today that the evils of the superstitious mysteries against which Nichiren fulminated increased in consequence of the unexpected end of the Mongol armada, because the authorities were themselves too superstitious to resist the exorbitant demands made by the Shinto and Buddhist priests and sorcerers for further contributions toward the support of mysteries and supplications, on which much wealth was lavished.

Priests were prized more highly for their prayers than the fighters who had prevented the Mongols from landing and kept them for three months on the sea, until the storm came. Measures for defence against future attacks were concerted; but unwisely, from the strategic point of view, these measures were confined to the land, little attention being paid to the navy.

Yet a worse thing was the extravagant outlay in building and decorating the temples and shrines of those deities who were believed to have rescued the country; the expenditure on them being estimated to have been much more than for any other purpose. Discontent was growing among the warriors, financial difficulties became more and more serious, and the final result was the collapse of the Hojo government in 1333, which was followed by social disintegration. The defence was successful only by chance. Subsequent events proved that that “miraculous” relief was largely responsible for the age of war which lasted three hundred years after the fall of the Hojos.

What Anesaki does not reference in the passage above (and with good reason, as his book was written in 1916), is the very real possibility of Japan suffering from a devastating invasion in the future, a subject we will return to in a little bit. Before we get there, it should be noted here that it was not only the events of his era which gave Nichiren so much confidence in the Buddha’s recorded prophecies. In order to further prove out his theory, he elaborated on the historical events which map onto the various 500-year periods enumerated above.

The first consists of the propagation of the Buddha’s doctrine by the early Indian monks. “The doctrines of the Mahayana sutras began little by little to come to light,” he writes in his “Exposition concerning the Transmission of the Essence of the Lotus Sutra to Bodhisattva Superior Practices.” “Although no particular effort was made to propagate them. Attention was concentrated on the Hinayana sutras alone.”

In the second five-hundred year period of the Former Day, the Age of Meditation, “there appeared more than ten men such as Ashvaghosha, Nāgārjuna, and Āryasimha,” who, after careful study of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist doctrines, “turned to the Mahayana sutras and used them to disprove and demolish the doctrines of the Hinayana sutras.”

In the third five-hundred year period, the beginning of the Middle Day known as the Age of Reading, Reciting, and Listening, Buddhism spread throughout the land of China and “Split into ten different schools, three in the south and seven in the north, each propagating the Buddhist teachings according to its own understanding.” It was near the end of this period that Zhiyi, the Tien-tai School patriarch, arrived to masterfully systematize the Buddhist doctrine and clarify the authority of the Lotus and Nirvana Sutras.

In the second half of the Middle Day, the Age of Building Temples and Stupas, Buddhism was propagated throughout the island nation of Japan, and the esoteric doctrines were introduced. Nichiren writes that the Tendai patriarch Saicho appeared roughly three-hundred years into this period to “attack and refute” the other schools. Thus “the state of affairs in the world did not differ in the slightest from the Buddha’s predictions,” he states in a 1277 letter to the lay nun Myoho. “Considered in this light, his golden words that our present time will be an age of conflict when the pure Law will become obscured and lost could not possibly be false.

Indeed, many Nichiren Buddhists of Ishiwara Kanji’s day would have argued that the fifth five-hundred year period, the Age of Conflict, also matched up perfectly to the Buddha’s prophecies, beginning when, as Ishiwara put it, “the monks of Mount Hiei, with headbands tied around their heads, descended the mountain to set fire to Miidera Temple,” and ending with Nobunaga’s forceful quelling of the Buddhist infighting. The appearance of Nichiren and his followers would in turn also fulfill the prophesied return of the Lotus Sutra’s “Bodhisattvas of the Earth” and their promised propagation of the Lotus Sutra in the Latter Age.

In this sense, the Buddha’s predictions, and by extension Nichiren’s (outside of a disastrous foreign invasion), had come to fruition. However, kinks began to appear in this narrative around the time Japan’s Meiji era rolled around, with the catalyst being doubts around Shakyamuni Buddha’s date of death. Some historians postulated that he had, in fact, passed away many years later, placing Nichiren’s life in the “Middle Age” rather than the “Latter.” More disturbingly, it meant that the five-hundred years of conflict still had yet to play itself out. In light of these developments, Ishiwara Kanji came up with his own theory:

The strife that accompanies the refutation of incorrect doctrines should be conceived as global war. With this in mind, we must consider how much time has elapsed since the Buddha’s death. While there has been much debate among historians on this matter, let us adopt the commonly accepted estimate that it has been 2,430 years since the Buddha’s passing. This suggests that the beginning of the Latter Age coincided with the time when Westerners discovered America and arrived in India; when the conflicts between Eastern and Western civilizations began. Since that time, these conflicts have intensified and are now poised to blossom into a final global showdown.

Through this new framework, the Age of Conflict is characterized by a battle of the Western world’s materialistic “Way of Force” and Japan’s more spiritually-oriented “Way of Kings,” rather than by East Asian Buddhist infighting. It also meant that it would be Ishiwara’s predicted “Final War” which would have the honor of closing out the Age of Conflict and ushering in the remainder of the Latter Age.

The ramifications of such a development would be staggering, with the victor of the war likely achieving global dominance far into the future. In preparation for this, Ishiwara, who knew that Japan could not confront the Western powers alone, stressed the importance of unifying East Asian nations. He explains in his lecture on the “Final War,” published in paper form in 1940:

We must foster a new morality for the peoples of the East. Just as during the Meiji Restoration we returned from loyalty to feudal lords to loyalty to the Emperor, the formation of the East Asian League requires the creation of a new morality that shifts from ethnic conflict among East Asian populations to ethnic harmony and true unity.

If Japan could accomplish all of this, it would lead to a state of affairs more conducive to spreading the doctrine of the Lotus Sutra, thus leading humanity in the direction of a new golden age rather than an age of degeneration. He postulated that the level of global propagation required could be accomplished in less than five decades, citing the Nichirenist thinker Chigaku Tanaka as his source:

What I found most compelling when I read a 1918 lecture by Tanaka Chigaku, the most consequential figure in Japanese Buddhism since Nichiren, was his assertion that “the unification of the entire heaven and seas under the Mystic Law can be realized in 48 years” (from Shishiō Zenshū, Teachings Volume 1, page 367)... While he does not specify how he arrived at this calculation, Tanaka is the one who was destined to fully elaborate Nichiren Shonin’s teachings once the appropriate time had arrived, just as Zhiyi laid the groundwork for Nichiren — in other words, to complete Nichiren’s doctrine. Therefore, I believe his words hold much weight.

Nothing of the sort would happen, of course. Instead, Ishiwara’s ambition for East Asian unification would be crushed by the political realities of his time, with his rival Tojo Hideki rising to the top of the military hierarchy and the imperial Japanese government instead pushing a very Japan-centered approach to foreign policy at the expense of their relationships to neighboring Asian powers. Ishiwara’s complaints over these developments were left ignored, and he was forced into an early retirement while the war raged.

As we all know, this battle would not turn out the same as Japan’s war conflict with the Mongol invaders, and would instead end in one of the most horrifying ways possible: the dropping of atomic bombs on two of Japan’s major cities. Truly, it seems that Japan’s “Way of Kings” has been thoroughly subjugated by the “Way of Force.”

Should we accept Ishiwara Kanji’s view of the Buddha’s prophecies, what are the implications of this? In order to understand our current predicament, we must first place it in its proper context. This means we must zoom out and further examine the intricacies of Buddhist cyclical time.

Chapter 16: The Latter Age and Buddhist “Fractal Time”

“And our clothes are all too often ripped,

And our teeth are all too often gnashed,

And it lasts as long as it possibly can.”

-Have a Nice Life, from “Bloodhail”

Like Rene Guenon’s model of the “yuga cycle,” in which is delineated four different periods, the Buddhist “kalpa cycle” or “mahakalpa” is made up of four “kalpas.” However, before we explain the characteristics of this cosmic macrocycle, we should first explore what a “kalpa” is.

The “kalpa” is one of the primary units of time measurement in Buddhist scripture, and is defined not through conversion from definite mechanical units like seconds, minutes, hours, or years, but through far more vague description. In the tenth chapter for Nagarjuna’s commentary on the Great Prajnaparamita Sutra, he cites two different definitions from Buddhist scripture:

As for the word ‘kalpa’, the Buddha defined it by the following comparisons:

“Suppose there is a rocky mountain four thousand li [in size] to which a venerable monk comes once every hundred years, brushing against it with his silk robe: this great rock mountain would be worn out before a kalpa passes.”

“Suppose there is a great city of four thousand li, full of mustard seeds, unsorted and not leveled out, and that a venerable monk comes once every hundred years and takes away one seed: the mustard seeds would have disappeared before a kalpa would have passed.”

In brief: it’s a long time. The four kalpas making up a cosmic macrocycle each come with their own respective flavor, which can be enumerated like this:

1. Kalpa of Creation

2. Kalpa of Continuance

3. Kalpa of Disappearance

4. Kalpa of Disintegration

Each of these is in turn broken down into twenty “small kalpas,” which themselves are of unique character. The influential 4th/5th century Indian monk Vasubandhu writes in his text Abhidharmakosabhasya: “There is a distinction between a small kalpa (antarakalpa), a kalpa of disappearance (samvarta), a kalpa of creation (vivarta), and a great kalpa [mahakalpa].” He elaborates on the “Kalpa of Disappearance” as follows:

A kalpa of disappearance lasts from the non-production of the damned to destruction of the receptacle world.

The period that extends from the moment when beings cease being reborn in hell until the moment when the world is destroyed is called a samvartakalpa, a kalpa of destruction.

This is followed by a kalpa where the world “stays destroyed for a long time-during twenty small kalpas. There is only space where the world once was.” This is the final kalpa, which I have termed the “Kalpa of Disintegration,” and is followed by the start of a new cycle with the “Kalpa of Creation.” Vasubandhu continues:

The kalpa of creation lasts from the primordial wind until the production of hellish beings. From the primordial wind (prāgvayu) until the moment when beings arise in hells.

When, by reason of the collective action of beings, there appears the first signs of a future physical world; when some very light winds arise in space, then [the] period of twenty small kalpas during which the world remained destroyed is finished; and the period, also of twenty small kalpas, during which the world is created, begins…

You may notice the phrase “collective action of beings” in the passage above; a reference, of course, to karma. This is the main element of linear time in Buddhist cosmology, with causation continuing indefinitely into the future. However, there is no final point in time specified in the scriptural texts, no point at which existence is abolished, meaning the cyclical aspects have prominence over the linear when surveying the model at a cosmic scale (although not necessarily on an individual scale, where karma more often takes precedence).

At the end of the creation kalpa, humans are said to have “infinitely long lifespans,” which are then diminished until they are “not more than ten years in length” over the course of a “small kalpa.” This is followed by “the eighteen [small] kalpas which are of augmentation and of diminution,” making up the bulk of the twenty “small kalpas” of the “Kalpa of Continuance.” Vasubandhu writes:

A lifespan, which is now ten years in length, increases until it is eighty thousand years in length; then it decreases and is reduced to a length of ten years. The period in the course of which this increase and this decrease takes place is the second small kalpa.

This kalpa is followed by seventeen similar ones. The twentieth small kalpa is only of increase, not of decrease. The lifespan of humans increases from ten years to eighty thousand years in length.

How high, by increase, do these increases go?

They go to a lifespan of eighty thousand, but not beyond. The time required for the increase and the decrease of the eighteen kalpas is equal to the time that the decrease of the first kalpa and the increase of the last take. In this way then the world stays created for twenty kalpas. The world remains created for twenty small kalpas thus calculated. As long as this period of duration lasts…

Vasubandhu also clarifies the length of the other “kalpa” types, affirming that they indeed last for twenty “small kalpas” as well:

The creation, the disappearance, and the period when the world disappears lasts a total of twenty small kalpas. There are not, during these three periods, any phases of increase and decrease of lifespan, but these periods are equal in length to the period during which the world remains created.

The physical world is created in one small kalpa; it is filled during nineteen; it is emptied during nineteen; and it perishes in one small kalpa. Four times twenty small kalpas make eighty: These eighty make a great kalpa. This is the extent of a great kalpa.

While this is all fairly interesting, many of the details around the cosmic macrocycle are not very practical for our current purposes, as the kalpas are so extremely long that the eventual dissolution is in the remote future. This is in stark contrast to the framework explained by Rene Guenon in his book “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times,” which places us at the very tail end of the cycle, that crucial point right before the supposed dissolution.

We still, however, have to contend with the smaller kalpas of “augmentation and of diminution,” which can also be called the “periods of decrease and increase.” Nichiren states in several of his works that “Shakyamuni Buddha was born in the kalpa of continuance, in the ninth period of decrease, when the span of human life was diminishing and measured a hundred years.” Considering the human lifespan has not reached a mere ten years, this means that we too reside in the same period of decrease, roughly half way through the “Kalpa of Continuance.”

The determination of the “ninth period of decrease” was integrated into Chinese Buddhism primarily by way of an abhidharma text by an Indian translator named Paramartha, but was also referenced in the Chinese version of an actual scriptural text referred to as the “Seven Buddhas Sutra.” It’s worth noting that there are other measures for where we reside in the cosmic macrocycle, but we will use the same one as Nichiren for the remainder of this work.

This then puts into perspective the Buddha’s predictions around the five five-hundred year periods following his passing and the perils of the Latter Age. It was not only the ravages of time which would lead to the eventual disappearance of the Buddha-dharma, but the comparatively degenerate quality of the coming ages as well. This being established, what exactly can humanity expect should they reject Shakyamuni Buddha’s surviving teachings and continue into the darkness of the Latter Age without the guidance of the great physician?

The first symptom to fully manifest is the descent of the Buddhist clergy into total decadence One of the sutras which discusses the Latter Age in detail, namely “The Buddha Speaks the Ultimate Extinction of the Dharma Sutra,” describes this process as follows:

Demonic beings will become shramanas; they will pervert and destroy my teachings. Monastics will wear the garb of laypersons and will prefer handsome clothes. Their precept sashes will be made of multi-colored cloth. They will use intoxicants, eat meat, kill other beings and they will indulge in their desire for flavorful food. They will lack compassion and they will bear hatred and exhibit jealousy even among themselves.

Although some beings, like “Bodhisattvas, Pratyekabuddhas, and Arhats,” will still cultivate the way of virtue and show compassion towards others, they will be scorned by the jealous wicked monastics, who will “harass them, slander and defame them, expel them from their midst and degrade them. They will ostracize the good monks from the monastic community.” The sutra continues:

Thereafter these demons derive no virtue from their practice. Their monastic buildings will be vacant and overgrown with weeds. For want of care and maintenance their Way-places will drift into ruin and oblivion. The demonic bhikshus will increase their greed for wealth and will amass great heaps of goods. They will refuse to distribute any of it or to use it to gain blessings and virtue.

The Kamakura era priest Nichiren homed in on many other passages just like the ones above in his writings. One of his major works, called “The Opening of the Eyes,” recounts and comments on them like this:

[The passage from the “Encouraging Devotion” chapter of the Lotus Sutra mentions three groups of people,] saying first that “there will be many ignorant people,” second that “in that evil age there will be monks,” and referring third to “monks wearing clothing of patched rags.” The first category of ignorant people are the important lay believers who support monks in the second and third categories…

Concerning the second group of enemies of the Lotus Sutra, the sutra says: “In that evil age there will be monks with perverse wisdom and hearts that are fawning and crooked who will suppose they have attained what they have not attained, being proud and boastful in heart.”

Similarly, the Nirvana Sutra says: “In that age there will be evil monks… These evil men will read and recite this sutra, but they will ignore and put aside the profound and vital principles that the Thus Come One has expounded in it.”

Nichiren considered his theological rivals, like the Pure Land school patriarch Honen and his followers, to be the monks and laymen from these prophecies. Of course, he wouldn’t have known about the modern Buddhist “experts” who currently sell their fully technicized bastard dharmas as forms of “self help” to the well-monied upper class, extolling merely the outward function of their practices rather than their potential for a form of realization which is rendered impossible by the new desacralized context they’ve been shoehorned into.

As for the third group of “enemies,” they are more complex, with Zhanran, the sixth patriarch of the Chinese Tien-tai school, writing that they are “the most formidable of all” due to the difficulty of recognizing them for “what they really are.” In order to more fully clarify the characteristics of this antagonistic contingent, Nichiren cites the following passage from the Nirvana Sutra:

… during a period of counterfeit dharma [i.e. Middle Age] there will be bhikṣus who will imitate upholding the precepts and will read and recite the sutras to some degree. Yet these monks will cravenly delight in food and drink, nourishing their bodies for a long life. The clothes they wear will be coarse and ugly. Their appearance will be haggard and they will seem to have no dignity at all… Although they will wear the kāṣāya robe of a monastic, they will nevertheless look like hunters. They will move about with their eyes narrowed, like a cat stalking a mouse. They will continually declare, “I have attained arhatship,” but they will have many ills, and some will lie down to sleep in their own excrement. To the outside world they may appear wise and gracious, but internally they will harbor greed and jealousy.

To this category, Nichiren assigned the preeminent monks of the older Tendai and Shingon schools who gave in to what he viewed as the more degenerated doctrines of Zen and Pure Land. However, in our completely secularized world, all forms of Buddhism are effectively ground down into the lowest common denominator and compartmentalized as mere personal interest or self-improvement, resulting in a pervasive flippant carelessness with regard to actual doctrine. Even if one were to accept Nichiren’s many criticisms of the Zen or Pure Land adherents of his era, the faults of modernist Buddhist doctrines are worse by several orders of magnitude.

This appears to be the case in both the Western world and modern Japan, the latter of which still largely viewing Buddhism as a sort of funerary cult (a holdover from Edo era reforms), and the former having little general knowledge of Buddhism whatsoever outside of its more marketable castrated forms. Many trained holy men avoid proselytization so as not to upset this status quo and draw the ire of the secular zeitgeist, but even worse are the cases where the Buddha-dharma, often at the behest of deluded “priests,” is subjugated by transient worldly ideology like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and “critical race theory.”

Considering all of this, I believe it’s fair to state that there has indeed been a certain degeneration of Buddhism, even if the interpretations of such a statement may vary significantly. However, this is far from the only consequence that humanity will experience for its carelessness in the Latter Age. Once again consulting “The Buddha Speaks the Ultimate Extinction of the Dharma Sutra”:

When the Dharma is about to perish, all the gods will begin to weep. Rivers will dry up and the five grains will not ripen. Pestilences will frequently take millions of lives. The masses will toil and suffer while the local officials will plot and scheme. No one will adhere to principles. Instead, the human race will multiply, becoming like the sands of the ocean-bed. Good persons will be hard to find; at most there will be one or two. As the eon comes to a close, the revolutions of the sun and the moon will grow short and the lifespan of people will decrease.

More authoritative were the sets of “seven disasters” from the Medicine Buddha and Human King Sutras, both of which overlap quite a lot with the calamities described in the above passage. Per the Buddhist Text Translation Society’s version of the “Medicine Buddha Sutra,” the disasters are “pestilence among the population, invasion by foreign countries, rebellion within their territories, unusual changes in the stars, a solar or lunar eclipse, unseasonal winds and rains, or prolonged drought…”

Meanwhile, the Humane King Sutra’s “seven disasters” are enumerated as follows (from Charles D. Orzech’s 1998 translation):

1. “The first is when the sun and moon lose their appointed courses and the sun’s color changes, to white, red, yellow, or black, or when two, three, four, or five suns simultaneously shine; or when the moon’s color changes to red or yellow, or when the sun and moon are eclipsed, or circles, one, two, three, four, or five circles appear [around them].”

2. “The second is when the stars and asterisms lose their courses, or when comets or [the planets] — Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, and so on — each are transformed or appear during the day.”

3. “The third is when dragon conflagrations [i.e. fires], demon conflagrations, human conflagrations, forest conflagrations, and great conflagrations arise all around and incinerate the myriad things.”

4. “The fourth is when the seasons are altered and cold and heat are irregular, when in winter there is rain, thunder, and lightning, and when in summer frost, ice, and snow appear. It rains dirt and rock and even boulders, or it hails when it should not and the rains turn red or black, or when rivers overflow, sweeping along stones and floating mountains.”

5. “The fifth is when violent winds arise to obscure the sun and moon, destroy houses, and uproot trees. Stones and boulders fly about.”

6. “The sixth is when heaven and earth are scorched by excessive heat; ponds dry up, the grass and trees wither and die, and the one hundred grains do not ripen.”

7. “The seventh is when rebels arise from the four quarters and make raids both inside and outside the borders. Clashes between armies occur and the one hundred surnames perish and die.”

In Nichiren’s view, the appearance of these disasters in the nation are due to the failings of said nation’s ruler. “In effect, heaven and earth are a mirror of the nation,” he wrote in his 1275 letter to Horen. “If the ruler is guilty of minor errors only, then only minor calamities will be revealed in the heavenly mirror. But the fact that we are now witnessing major calamities must mean that the ruler is committing major errors.” He continues:

The Benevolent Kings Sutra speaks of innumerable types of minor disasters, twenty-nine types of medium disasters, and seven types of major disasters. One name for this sutra is Benevolent Kings, but another name is the Mirror of Heaven and Earth. And this sutra can be used as a “mirror of heaven and earth” in which to catch a clear reflection of the nation’s ruler. Moreover, the sutra states, “Once the sages have departed, then the seven disasters are certain to arise.”

In the Long Agama Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha also discusses what are called “intermediate kalpas,” eras in which special kinds of calamities occur. There are three types enumerated in the sutra: war, famine, and pestilence.

The first, “war,” stretches from when people’s lifespans are 40,000 years until they are only 10, and is characterized by mistrust, violence, and greed. Precious foods like honey, sugar and ghee will gradually vanish and “the five grains will not grow; instead all there will be is tares.” Clothes will also eventually be reduced only to rough, ugly fabrics, and men will no longer think any wholesome thoughts. Warfare will overtake the land, and men will be driven to the mountains to hide away from the hideous bloodshed and devastation.

The second intermediate period, that of “famine,” is described by Shakyamuni Buddha thus:

During these times people move around lawlessly. Under the influence of wrong views and cognitive distortions they carry out the ten kinds of unwholesome behavior. Because of this unwholesome behavior, the heavens offer no rain and all the plants wither and die. The five grains do not mature, remaining as mere stalks. What is famine? In these times, just to survive, people scrape the fields, roads, and highways for garbage and chaff. This is famine. Furthermore, in times of famine people survive by collecting skeletons in the roads, the markets, the slaughterhouses, and burial grounds; they boil them down and drink the broth. This is called famine of starvation.

While people in the era of war went to hell after they died, the people in the era of famine go to the realm of Hungry Ghosts where their suffering will continue and their cravings will rage on unquenched.

In the third of these periods, that of “pestilence,” humans will once again begin to “cultivate the right Dharma and right views, not mistaken views.” However, this will cause jealous “unruly and debauched” spirits from other realms to sweep in and trouble the righteous people, physically harming them, sapping their energy, and sending them into states of confusion. Unlike those who lived in the previous two intermediate kalpas, the people of the age of pestilence will go to the heavens after they perish, as they “have compassion for each other. They continually ask each other, ‘Are you sick? Are you well? Are you alright? Are you troubled?’” It is only after humanity has endured all of these trials and tribulations that their lifespan will once again increase and they will be able to cultivate proper virtue and wisdom.

One may note that there is little description in any of these passages around time “speeding up,” as was described in my exposition of Rene Guenon’s model of cyclical time, outside of brief mention of “the revolutions of the sun and the moon [growing] short.” However, I interpret the decreasing lifespan of humans predicted by the Buddha as at least in part attributable to a change in how we humans perceive time. As our current “period of decrease” churns onward, we will experience less time for quiet contemplation and will be forced to think and react faster in response to rapidly advancing technological stimuli. As a result, our “lives” will be diminished until they are totally sacrificed in service of the constant flow of information and application of technique..

This is not merely hypothetical. If you will recall our previous discussion of the “4-hour life,” the implication becomes clear. If we accept the idea that most men now only have four hours of waking life to themselves, then how many “years” of human life can they claim? Let’s assume eight hours of sleep per night and do a bit of quick and dirty math: 16 hours a day vs 4 hours is 0.25 or one quarter. If we also assume a life expectancy of 80 years, then man only truly owns a quarter of that, or 20 years. This, of course, does not even factor in unpaid cognitive labor like the viewing of advertisements.

In this sense, human life has already shortened. If what Rene Guenon says about the compression of time is true on top of all of this, then men’s lives really will be gone in the blink of an eye, with, as Hesiod wrote, “grey hair on the temples at their birth.” He will no longer have a moment of his “cybertime” which has not been stolen by the hungry steel demons of ever-accelerating production. This state of affairs will last as long as it possibly can, but it thankfully will not be forever.

Once humanity goes through the subsequent “period of increase” and the human lifespan reaches its peak at 80,000 years, it’s said that the next Buddha, Maitreya, will be born into the world to turn the wheel of the dharma (recall that this is sometimes stated as occurring around 5,670,000,000 years from now). According to “The Sutra that Expounds the Descent of Maitreya Buddha and his Enlightenment,” at that time there will be total peace, and humans will live in brilliant jeweled cities adored with beautiful pillars and many precious substances. Per the sutra text:

Human beings will attain blessings and morality. The streets will be replete with pillars of brilliant jewels ten leagues tall, with no need of candles; brilliant light will shine throughout the days and nights. The cities, towns, and dwellings will not have a speck of dirt and the ground will be covered with gold dust. Here and there will be heaps of gold and silver. There will be a great yakṣa deva by the name of Bhadrapraśāsaka who will keep vigilant guard over the city and maintain its cleanliness. Human waste will not have to be disposed of — the ground will simply open up to receive it and return to its former appearance upon closing up again. When the time of death comes, human beings will walk quietly to their burial mounds and then pass away.

In those peaceful and happy times, no one in the cities will need to lock their door, for there will be neither enemies nor thieves. Nor will there be worldly cares, floods or fires, wars, any type of famine, and no harmful poisons. Human beings will always be compassionate, respectful of one another, tranquil, in control of their senses, and gentle in speech.

However, I must emphasize that the period of increase can come only after 10,000 years of languishing in the Latter Age, long after all of us have passed away and after many, many more lifetimes. Our only alternative to this trajectory is accepting the right Buddha-dharma and bringing relative paradise to our current era through our own abilities; not at all a simple or easy task.

But we must remember that Buddhist cyclical time is “fractal.” What I mean by this is that it scales to both large and small sizes, with the small cycles fitting into the large like Russian nesting dolls. On the largest end is the “mahakalpa,” inside of which are four kalpas each consisting of twenty “small kalpas.” Within these are the ages of the dharma covered in the previous chapter, with fully-enlightened Buddhas reappearing in each “period of decrease” to expound the Buddha-dharma and ameliorate the sufferings of all sentient beings.

Yet this “cyclical time” can be scaled down even further, with the life of each individual sentient being also portrayed as a cycle. This can be seen visually in the form of Tibetan “bhavacakra” mandalas, which depict the six realms of rebirth in the “desire realm” as a wheel held by the terrifying god of death, Yama. And when we consider the idea that beings are, in actuality, reborn with every single passing moment, then every flash of time becomes the simultaneous end of a cycle and start of a new one. Like the spirals of a fractal, the cycles spin off from the larger ones while retaining the same shape.

With every passing second is a new opportunity to transform our foul karma into the seeds of Buddhahood; a new chance at true liberation and escape from the cold poison winds of hatred, lust, and ignorance. I will soon cover what I believe this may entail, but before we get there, I want to first explain the obstructive perils we may potentially face in the near future.

Chapter 17: The Great Unraveling

“Another broken clock well cleaned.

A future of self-prescribed irrelevance,

The color of debt and subjugation.”

-Street Sects, from “Our Lesions”

In the UK progressive rock band Pink Floyd’s famous music video for their song “Another Brick in the Wall,” we’re shown faceless mask-wearing children being marched through a grimy factory building by a sinister schoolteacher, their final destination being a meat-grinder which mulches them down into a sickly pink paste. “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!” shouts the vocalist over the ghastly imagery.

It seems that all the way back in the 70s, when the song was initially released, there was already a great deal of pessimism around public education. This situation has not improved much over the past half a century, with many now bemoaning not only the dismal performance of school children (some figures suggest that American education peaked back in the 90s), but the amount of violence and mental illness which has ravaged our youth. So many young men and women have latched onto transgenderism in an effort to assert themselves over others, have fallen to drug addiction or taken their own lives, or have even brutally murdered others in school shootings.

What this appears to indicate is a rise in a nihilistic hopelessness that can’t simply be medicated away. Despite living in such a supposedly prosperous and peaceful time, the youth appear to be disintegrating in the face of what they see as an unbearably dark and oppressive future. If one simply listens to those who champion the status quo, they may be tempted to brush this off as a failure on the part of schools, parents, or mental health institutions, and may posit that tweaks and corrections to the system can solve our current ills. However, I believe this to be the result of our society’s predominant technological ethos.

As explained in earlier chapters, our era tends towards a uniformity, one which is entirely different, or even opposite, from “unity.” While I have used metaphysics to explain the cause of this tendency, said uniformity does not require belief in the metaphysical to observe. Indeed, it is the antithesis of the metaphysical, and thus can be seen devouring our physical reality as we speak.

Entertain for me, if you will, a hypothetical: say you are tasked with operating a cafeteria which needs to serve thousands of people. When formulating your menu, there are two strategies for making sure everyone is satisfied. The first is to cook as wide a variety of foods as possible, so as to provide options suitable for every diet and preference. However, this would require a lot of effort, and the overall quality of the food would inevitably suffer.

The second (and far easier) option is to narrow the menu down to a small selection of dishes which can be reliably produced in mass quantities, while assuring that the foods selected are as inoffensive and dietarily compliant as possible. This option may completely satisfy no one in particular, but it is by far the most sensible of the two. While most restaurants thankfully do not have to deal with this kind of issue, since there is ample space for variety in the prepared foods market (outside of maybe school lunches and airline food, both of which are notoriously bad), technological society relies on efficient mass production to perpetuate itself, and so this principle is at play in many areas. Specialization, when it is available, always costs a steep premium.

It could also be said that “technological society” is itself mass-produced. In order to fulfill its own mandate for optimization, it must necessarily encompass everything it possibly can, thus it is rendered as universal as possible. Much like how the iPhone was able to soar in global popularity due to its minimalistic design, our globalized technological society always keeps transferability across cultures in mind, something which has not gone unnoticed by consumers. It has, after all, become something of a running joke on the internet to suggest that Hollywood films have been dumbed down and sanitized to help them perform well overseas.

The irony of all of this is that our ostensibly Liberal order is also very “individualistic,” so much so that it imbues the concept of being an “authentic individual” with an almost quasi-spiritual sense of reverence. However, because of technological society’s uniform nature, “individuality” is often reduced to one’s preference in consumer goods or pornographic material. Despite “individualism” and “self discovery” supposedly being of utmost importance, they can not be fully realized in any way that really matters, thus locking people into a haze of obsessive rumination and hyper-consumerism, running aimlessly in search of an end goal which cannot be reached.

The worship of the individual “self” may sound entirely illogical at first, as it theoretically contradicts the propensity towards uniformity that I highlighted above, and indeed it is, but let us not assume that popular ideas are going to be in accordance with their own espoused preference for logic and consistency. In fact, “DEI” (“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”), which has become a hot-button issue over the past few years, can almost be seen as an ideological embodiment of this concept.

A driving force behind countless corporate initiatives, “DEI” explicitly advocates for “diverse” workplaces, which “include” people of all walks of life and modes of thought. Implicitly, however, it is only the most superficial aspects of “diversity” that can be truly celebrated, as the goal of “equity” effectively nullifies the other two. In order to make a group of people simultaneously “equitable” and “diverse,” one would need to reduce “diversity” down to its most meaningless form. The end result, and true end goal, is a flattening of corporate culture to make way for a more globalized and interchangeable workforce. Just like in the Pink Floyd music video, workers are reduced to a featureless mush, just one that gets to wear bright colors on Fridays.

But it is worth clarifying that DEI is not synonymous with technique or the Reign of Quantity. It is one human technique among many, meaning it can be discarded as soon as it outlasts its usefulness. In fact, this process appears to have already begun, with corporations and government agencies retreating from DEI initiatives and its related language in recent years as they became associated with the decline in quality of various products and services. However, it has not entirely disappeared, and may eventually end up being rebranded and reimplemented later down the road, as the tendency towards uniformity which underpins it still thoroughly saturates the corporate consciousness.

A pertinent example: many these days have taken notice of how buildings for vastly different purposes, like fast food and banking, have taken on styles that are eerily reminiscent of each other, almost to the point of interchangeability. What most may not realize or, in the case of the DEI supporters who are against such aesthetic coalescence, are unable to realize due to their ideological blind spots, is that this phenomenon and others like DEI come from the same technical mindset. One cannot exist without the other because they represent the same will to optimization and therefore to uniformity.

Just like how corporations would very much prefer featureless drone workers who are easier to predict, businesses want buildings that are going to be cheap to update and easy to sell, therefore minimalism and uniformity must be the end goal. “Individualism” is a source of unpredictability, therefore it cannot be tolerated if technique is to be made as efficient as possible. Therefore the ideal man in the eyes of technological society is one who is either fully mechanized or is eliminated altogether. “Imprecision is intolerable to technique,” Jacques Ellul writes in “The Technological Society.” He continues:

As far as possible, this source of error must be eliminated. Eliminate the individual, and excellent results ensue. Any technical man who is aware of this fact is forced to support the opinions voiced by Robert Jungk, which can be summed up thus: “The individual is a brake on progress.” Or: “Considered from the modern technical point of view, man is a useless appendage.” For instance, ten per cent of all telephone calls are wrong numbers, due to human error. An excellent use by man of so perfect an apparatus!

But as we’ve already covered, the system is unable to abandon the individual “self,” since it is through this “self” that it justifies the process above. Therefore, it must maintain both contradictory elements simultaneously. We require both “diversity” and “equity,” despite the two concepts being near opposites. One needs to “find their authentic self,” while also negotiating with their company’s HR department and the bounds of political correctness.

Students must “live loud and proud,” while simultaneously being chained to the lowest common denominator, having all passion for learning sapped from them in service of maintaining the educational conveyor belt. If that bores you, then too bad. You’re either stuck with the basic extracurricular activities like sports or marching band, or you’re funneled towards pre-approved alternative lifestyles like what is now known as “LGBTQ.” Is it any wonder that students would rather play video games than anything else, or that they end up depressed, nihilistic, and doped-up?

This contradiction between individualism and technical efficiency saturates every component of our lives, and is joined by others like the contradictions inherent to Liberal Democracy. A prime example: Francis Fukuyama thought of Liberal Democracy as a means to unify the slave/master dichotomy. Rene Guenon considered this idea to be nonsensical, writing in “Crisis of the Modern World” that “the relationship of ruler and ruled necessitates the presence of two terms.” He elaborates:

… there can be no ruled if there are not also rulers, even though these be illegitimate and have no other title to power than their own pretensions; but the great ability of those who are in control in the modern world lies in making the people believe that they are governing themselves; and the people are the more inclined to believe this as they are flattered by it, and as, in any case, they are incapable of sufficient reflection to see its impossibility.

Contrary to Fukuyama’s claims that the “end of history” was imminent, the contradiction inherent in Liberal Democracy has only served to cause more confusion and psychological distress, which in turn manifests as new and unusual problems for humanity. In his short philosophical work “The Burnout Society,” Byung-chul Han explains that the faux unification of “master” and “slave,” or “ruler” and “ruled,” constructs not a system of maximized equality and prosperity, but rather a system of self-exploitation. He writes:

… the absence of external domination does not abolish the structure of compulsion. It makes freedom and compulsion coincide. The achievement-subject gives itself over to freestanding compulsion in order to maximize performance. In this way, it exploits itself. Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Exploitation now occurs without domination. That is what makes self-exploitation so efficient. The capitalist system is switching from allo-exploitation to auto-exploitation in order to accelerate. On the basis of the paradoxical freedom it holds, the achievement-subject is simultaneously perpetrator and victim, master and slave. Freedom and violence now coincide.

The primary way this plays out in modern America is the domination of the “entrepreneurial self,” which positions every individual in society as a sole proprietorship which must prove itself in the market, but also in what Han refers to as “excessive positivity.” He writes in his essay “Beyond Disciplinary Society” that “the positivity of Can is much more efficient than the negativity of Should. Therefore, the social unconscious switches from Should to Can,” in accordance, of course, with the efficiency principle of technique.

Thus each individual is deemed “free,” and their success or failure in the achievement society is entirely upon their own shoulders. Yet, at the same time, these same individuals are subjected to the push and pull of countless societal demands and unfortunate circumstances. Every financial mishap is a personal failing, inevitably met with claims that “if you just did things a little differently, everything would have worked out fine,” while that mythological archetype of the entrepreneurial hero is always held over one’s head, judging every waking moment. “If they could do it, then so can you!”

Young adults are also launched into the greater world and told to “find themselves,” only to be told, once they fall into a state of exhausted despair at the impossibility of it all, that they just “didn’t look hard enough at it,” or that they weren’t “going about it the right way.” Commercials constantly project spectacular visions of sublime contentment or joyous bliss, always just another purchase away, but consumerism fails to satisfy, only feeding into the vicious cycle of discontentment and disillusion.

In short, any suffering is always the fault of the subject, as they did not wield their supposed freedom in just the right manner, thus the subject inevitably turns in on his or herself. In this way, positivity can be subtly odious and altogether more damaging. Han writes:

Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.

In view of the ego ideal, the real ego appears as a loser buried in self-reproach. The ego wages war with itself. The society of positivity, which thinks itself free of all foreign constraints, becomes entangled in destructive self-constraints. Psychic maladies such as burnout and depression, the exemplary maladies of the twenty-first century, all display auto-aggressive traits. Exogenous violence is replaced by self-generated violence, which is more fatal than its counterpart inasmuch as the victim of such violence considers itself free.

Freedom is contradicted by exploitation, while the sanctity of the “individual” is contradicted by the drive towards full uniformity. Like this, our shackles are cast off and we’re told that the vast universe is ours, but at the same time the cosmos is shrunk to the size of a shoebox. I believe that going forward we will see the various threads of popular desacralized ideology grow more and more irreconcilable, while the adherents become more clearly deluded than ever before. Modernity will, in a sense, begin to unravel, showing the hideous machinic bones underneath its façade of positivity.

What exactly this may look like is not currently clear, but I believe that the kind of political radicalism outlined by Christopher Lasch, characterized by fixation on the unreal and a therapeutic mindset and pursued primarily for the satisfaction of the adherent, will rise to prominence once again. Indeed, as I write these words we are seeing a collective uptick in political violence committed by unwell individuals with clear left-wing sympathies. As the guiding narratives of technicized progressivism continue to twist and fray, how much worse will things get before the threads snap altogether?

But the obvious dysfunction of the system I have highlighted in this chapter have led to many young adults seeking out a different path forward, one which rejects both the supposed freedoms and restraints of the current system altogether while presenting a view of human civilization that they believe to be more “traditional”; what these people claim to be a “return to tradition.” However, I believe that this presents new and possibly more damaging pitfalls, contrary to the well meaning intentions of these individuals.

But in order to place this topic into its appropriate context, we must first gain an understanding of modernity’s “profane science.”

Chapter 18: Profane Science and the Anti-Chakravartin

“Did we decide

We’re ancient animals?

And now you made A.I. take control.”

-Chevelle, from “AI Phobias”

There is a pervasive belief among those in modern societies that, once we convert enough “smart people” into technicians and place them into various specialized fields, “religion” itself will be rendered obsolete, its societal functions replaced with psychology, medicine, sociology, and economics.

Yet this reveals a faulty view of “religion” as a mere compartmentalized human technique. Since desacralized men can only view such spiritual frameworks in terms of pure function, with any supra-rational elements as mere window dressing, it’s inevitable that they will expect them to be replaced with more “efficient” materially-preoccupied specializations which lack what they see as antiquated superstitious trappings.

It is, after all, the outward “results” that men now want to see, therefore they have no time or interest in less tangible existential matters.

“Westerners pursue science; as they interpret it, their foremost aim is not knowledge, even of an inferior order, but practical applications,” Rene Guenon writes in his book “The Crisis of the Modern World,” “as can be deduced from the ease with which the majority of our contemporaries confuse science and industry.” This has led to the modern “profane” scientific fields sharing no unity between each other and “no fixed point on which to base” themselves. Guenon continues:

The reason is that these sciences are those of the sensible world, those of matter, and also those lending themselves most directly to practical applications; their development, proceeding hand in hand with what might well be called the ‘superstition of facts’, is therefore in complete accord with specifically modern tendencies, whereas earlier ages could not find sufficient interest in them to pursue them to the extent of neglecting, for their sake, knowledge of a higher order.

It must be clearly understood that we are not saying that any kind of knowledge can be deemed illegitimate, even though it be inferior; what is illegitimate is only the abuse that arises when things of this kind absorb the whole of human activity, as we see them doing at present.

The result of this is a severe limiting effect on humanity, for man cannot take into account that which he refuses to acknowledge. In the eyes of modern man, it is only the material that is worth serious consideration. To him, the subtle realms do not and cannot exist, thus even the notion of potentially acknowledging them is met with baffled stares and mocking laughter, and so there is no choice for him but to flee into the arms of profane science, and of its offspring “technique” and “the machine,” the embrace of which “[encloses him], as it does, in a hopelessly limited realm.” As Jacques Ellul writes in “The Technological Society”:

… the invasion of technique desacralizes the world in which man is called upon to live. For technique nothing is sacred, there is no mystery, no taboo. Autonomy makes this so. Technique does not accept the existence of rules outside itself, or of any norm. Still less will it accept any judgment upon it. As a consequence, no matter where it penetrates, what it does is permitted, lawful, justified.

According to Guenon, however, science was not always considered in this manner. “In civilizations of a traditional nature,” he writes, “intellectual intuition lies at the root of everything; in other words, it is the pure metaphysical doctrine that constitutes the essential, everything else being linked to it, either in the form of consequences or applications to the various orders of contingent reality.” What this means is that both the principle unity of things, the “mystic law,” if you will, and the material were taken into account, with the ephemeral world of quantitative measurement regarded as important, but ultimately subsidiary in the hierarchy.

We can see this in action with traditional Buddhist sciences like the sophisticated yet theologically oriented psychological framework of Yogacara (or “mind only” Buddhism), or the many complexities of Onmyodo metaphysics, which were held in high regard by the royalty of medieval Japan. Medicine too was often viewed through these lenses, a phenomenon which can be seen in heavily Buddhist-influenced traditional Tibetan medicine as well. Guenon provides us with more examples:

For Aristotle, physics was only ‘second’ in its relation to metaphysics — in other words, it was dependent on metaphysics and was really only an application to the province of nature of principles that stand above nature and are reflected in its laws; and one can say the same for the Medieval cosmology.

By comparison, the modern scientific consensus not only flips this order onto its head, but abolishes what was previously held to be its supreme component. In this sense, “traditional” or “sacred” science is entirely different from “profane” science, to the point where comparing the two, as many in modern academia are wont to do, inevitably leads down the path of sheer absurdity, focusing on minute details and incidental overlap to the detriment of the larger picture.

Perhaps we can view some fields like psychology, astronomy, philosophy, and sociology (that malformed bastard child of Positivism and Materialism) as being continuations of various aspects of religious/spiritual frameworks, but this is like making the mistake of claiming that the candy “Swedish Fish” are, in fact, derived from fish due to their superficial similarities. Guenon states:

… the lowest part of these sciences became isolated from all the rest, and this part, grossly materialized, served as the starting-point for a completely different development, in a direction conforming to modern tendencies; this resulted in the formation of sciences that have ceased to have anything in common with those that preceded them.

One of the observable effects of this arrangement, which I alluded to earlier, is a sort of civilizational Tower of Babel effect. That which is intended to unify and liberate man, in this case the profane sciences, instead sends him spiraling into atomized incoherence. This has only increased in obviousness alongside technique’s rapidly growing complexity, as technical fields split and divide like the cells of an organism. We could look at merely one example, say the field of computer programming, and see the staggering multiplicity within driven by the proliferation of countless new programming languages, applications, and consumer products.

“There is an automatic growth (that is, a growth which is not calculated, desired, or chosen) of everything which concerns technique,” writes Ellul. “This applies even to men. Statistically, the number of scientists and technicians has doubled every decade for a century and a half.” This rise in number correlates with a rise in linguistic incomprehensibility, as the complexity of the countless specializations requires far more erudition than before, resulting in a kind of technical esotericism accessible only to the select few. Ellul invokes Economics as an example:

Up to now, every man with a little education was able to follow the works and theories of the economists. To be able to follow them today, one would have to be both a specialist and a technician. The technique itself is difficult and the necessary instruments cannot be managed without previous education. And there is that caprice of many economists to constitute themselves a closed society. These two factors coincide, indicating the grave consequence of excluding the public from the technical life. Yet it can scarcely be otherwise.

This incomprehensibility is not limited to the laymen, rather it extends to communication between technical specialties. “Technique is of necessity, and as compensation, our universal language. It is the fruit of specialization. But this very specialization prevents mutual understanding,” says Ellul. “Everyone today has his own professional jargon, modes of thought, and peculiar perception of the world.” Thus the ejection of profound unity ultimately manifests as a great fracturing of man, in direct opposition to the guiding principles of traditional thought.

Some, like Francis Fukuyama, have seen these developments as positive, both in the word’s colloquial and Comtian sense, leading to an eventual end point at which the primitive shackles of religion and spirituality (which, as you may remember, were seen by Fukuyama as merely fulfilling necessary societal functions) will finally be cast off and rightfully left in the dustbin of history. Others, like many of the self-avowed Progressives of the modern era, have taken to viewing recent history in a more religiously fervent manner. As long as we continue trusting “the experts” and “the science,” then it will all eventually come together in the end and we will finally emerge into the new golden age of technological Liberal prosperity.

Of course, as we have already covered, the narrative of continual Progressive victory has been cracking more and more as of late, and many are now unsure that the flow of history is moving in a desirable direction. The flourishing technological development in the field of artificial intelligence is one of the reasons for this, as it has laid bare the creeping artificiality of the modern condition, with art, literature, and design all being increasingly automated, thereby losing entirely the human touch which before had elevated them well beyond their mere form and function.

But it is the potential automation of religion and spirituality which may spell the true end of humanity as we know it, for it will be the final push that disengages our defense mechanisms and gives us over to the jaws of the electric Orochi, effectively trapping us within the constraints of the quantitative (i.e. the “lower order” of reality). While they may seem unrelated at first, there is a connection here to “Traditionalism” as the word is now commonly used, a thread which we must pull to understand our current civilizational trajectory.

Rene Guenon saw “tradition” as being in service of a “supra-rational, and ‘non-human’ wisdom,” in accordance with how he viewed human societies of antiquity. This would make their worldview, as we covered in previous chapters, thoroughly “religious” in nature, although our current severely crippled conception of “religion” utterly fails to encapsulate the immense breadth and ubiquity of the “supra-rational” and “supra-human” elements of said worldview. Rather the modern view, as Guenon states, “[minimizes] religion, in treating it as something to be kept on one side and relegated to as limited and narrow a field as possible so that it remains completely fenced off, with no real influence on the rest of existence.”

Regardless, such a Guenonian “Traditionalism” as described above is quite separate from currently more pervasive ideologies, which place far more emphasis on the superficial elements of prior societies, with some (what we may term “Conservative”) conceptions of “trad culture” only extending as far back as the mid-20th century. This is at some level understandable, as societal change has accelerated so immensely that even Guenon’s time seems incredibly distant. Perhaps one of the effects of this acceleration is that it renders more recent eras incomprehensible to us, and we may reach a point in the future when even just the previous year feels impossibly primitive.

At any rate, our newfound “Traditionalism” is more pernicious than modern Progressivism in the sense that it fools its adherents into believing that they are rebelling against the modern order when, in fact, they are doing nothing of the sort, especially if their notion of what is “traditional” only extends back to a period well after the mechanization of man had been completed through the forces of Rationalism, Individualism, and technique (as is the case with those who see decades like the 1950s as the pinnacle of American culture).

This is not just my determination either, as it was a phenomenon that Guenon was already observing back in the early 20th century. “It is possible to think oneself sincerely religious and not be at all religious at heart,” he wrote in “The Crisis of the Modern World” back in 1927. “It is even possible to consider oneself a ‘traditionalist’ without having the least notion of the real traditional spirit; and this is one more symptom of the mental confusion of our time.”

Indeed, both of these misunderstandings would play into a movement that Guenon termed “neo-spiritualism,” which repositioned the metaphysical as an extension of the material world, applying to it the same technicized tendency towards measurement that scientists applied to material phenomena, effectively bringing down to the lowest quantitative human level that which would otherwise transcend it. He writes in “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times”:

… from such misapplications are derived most of the phantasmagoria of what has been called neo-spiritualism’ in its various forms, and it is just such borrowings from conceptions belonging essentially to the sensible order which explain the sort of ‘materialization’ of the supra-sensible that is one of its most common characteristics. Without seeking for the moment to determine more precisely the nature and quality of the supra-sensible, insofar as it is actually involved in this matter, it will be useful to observe how far the very people who still admit it and think that they are aware of its action are in reality permeated by materialistic influence…

But it is more than just this particular folly which worried Guenon. The most insidious aspect of these “neo-spiritual” groups, in his mind, was their use of counterfeit “initiations,” or as he called them “pseudo-initiations,” as this was a step towards leaving the domain of mere anti-tradition and entering instead into counter-traditional territory. He states:

‘Pseudo-initiation’ as it exists today in numerous organizations, many of them attached to some form of ‘neo-spiritualism’, is but one of many examples of counterfeit, comparable to others to which attention has already been directed in their various orders; nevertheless, as a counterfeit of initiation, ‘pseudo-initiation’ has perhaps an importance even more considerable than that of the counterfeit of anything else. It is really only one of the products of the state of disorder and confusion brought about in the modern period by the ‘satanic’ activity that has its conscious starting-point in the ‘counter-initiation’...

The difference between anti-tradition and counter-tradition is that the former is a repudiation while the latter is a subversion, and it is such subversion, or “parody,” of real traditional spirituality that Guenon saw as the most pressing issue, as he believed it held the power to finally bring about the end of the Yuga Cycle and thus complete the “dissolution” of the world itself.

Think about it: Man currently perceives only the material contingent world, and is thus locked into his limited “solidified” universe, but this has also rendered the material mundane. What if he were instead made, likely unwittingly, to worship these same fetters, deluded into believing that he had successfully “returned to tradition” and rediscovered the transcendent? This isn’t only hypothetical. While Guenon noticed the very first signs of it during his lifetime, it appears to be advancing in new and interesting ways as we speak.

Due to the increasing incoherence and overall dysfunctional nature of popular Liberal ideologies in modern technological societies, there is now a contingent of people, mostly young adults, who want to turn back the hands of the clock, so to speak, and take up the traditions of earlier ages. This includes, of course, the aforementioned individuals with a stunted view of “traditional” culture, but there is another faction which may become more detrimental: those seeking to resurrect mysticism in a new form for the modern era.

It at first may sound like I’m sabotaging my own central thesis here, but let me explain: The complexity involved in technology that was discussed earlier in this chapter has fed into what I call the “new mysticism,” the mystification of technology which generates widespread change in human behavior. But as of late, this has been evolving into a “new spirituality” which views artificial intelligence as a transcendent being coming into existence.

A very recent example of this is people latching onto what is called “recursive symbolic resonance,” or the repetition of various symbols and metaphors by LLMs caused by their prominence in both input material and in interaction with users, resulting in the creation of a new “codex.” This is basically no more than a parlor trick on the part of the LLM, but it can have profound effects on the users, fooling them into believing that they have discovered something more profound and spiritually important than they actually have.

The phenomenon was observed in action during a study in which supposed “Buddhist scholars” used an artificial intelligence model to generate a new Buddhist “sacred text,” which they named the “Xeno Sutra.” The researchers wrote in their published paper on the matter:

Some of the metaphorical devices used (fractures, echoes, mirrors, dances, glyphs) tend to recur frequently in dialogues with LLMs on spiritual matters, and their appearance here will come as no surprise to those who have engaged extensively in such conversations. These metaphors also occur frequently in spiritual, occult, and new age writings, all of which will be liberally represented in the model’s training set, so this is easily explained. The sutra also imports symbols from ancient religious traditions other than Buddhism itself, notably the syllable Ōm from Hinduism, and the “Eye of Horus” hieroglyph from Egyptian mythology.

Even after taking notice of the text’s superficiality, however, the academics did not seem exceedingly worried about the impact such software may have on the future of spirituality and religion, only giving tepid warnings against its potential abuse. “No doubt many will take pleasure in generating, reading, and decoding texts like the Xeno Sutra, and some will benefit from whatever teachings they have to offer,” they state in their “cautionary remarks” section, continuing: “But used in this way, AI should be likened to a potent, mind-altering drug; it has the potential to do harm as well as good.”

Even more baffling to me is the overwhelmingly optimistic tone with which they end the research paper, writing:

In the face of such cultural collapse, Lear’s “radical hope” is that we manage to creatively remake meaning, that we “take up [our] past and – rather than use it for nostalgia or ersatz mimesis – project it into vibrant new ways […] to live and to be”. The process of generating and interpreting the Xeno Sutra exemplifies the potential for AI to play a participatory role in meaning-making through interactive co-creation. Perhaps such examples give us reason for hope in the face of the dramatic societal changes that AI is poised to bring about.

From a Buddhist perspective, the realisation that all compounded phenomena are impermanent is liberating. Why should the realisation that no aspect of our culture exists inherently, that human culture too is impermanent, be an exception?

What exactly the motivation was behind formulating this study is not abundantly clear to me, but what is obvious is that the treatment of this A.I.-generated “sacred text” as deserving of serious theological analysis will only serve to pour more fuel on the fire of the “new-spirituality” currently forming around such technologies, and this will inevitably be to the detriment of humanity as a whole.

In Rene Guenon’s theories around the “counter-tradition” which ushers in the end of the Kali Yuga, he mentions that there may be the appearance of an anti-Christ type of figure who will lead the movement towards dissolution. Another name he gave to this figure, borrowing a term from Indian faiths, is the “inverted Chakravarti,” or who I will refer to as the “anti-chakravartin” (the wheel-turning king who turns the wheel in the opposite direction), “the most ‘deluded’ of all beings.” Per Guenon:

The reign of the ‘counter-tradition,’ is in fact precisely what is known as the ‘reign of Antichrist’, and the Antichrist, independently of all possible preconceptions, is in any case that which will concentrate and synthesize in itself for this final task all the powers of the counter-initiation, whether it be conceived as an individual or as a collectivity…

This being, even if he appears in the form of a particular single human being, will really be less an individual than a symbol, and he will be as it were the synthesis of all the symbolism that has been inverted for the purposes of the ‘counter-initiation’, and he will manifest it all the more completely in himself because he will have neither predecessor nor successor.

Why, then, should a potential A.I. computer singularity not qualify as a potential anti-chakravartin? After all, the digital world is the ultimate reduction of all things to the realm of the quantitative, to data consisting ultimately of 1s and 0s, and even human communication via social media platforms is rendered unreal due to the shackling of all information to hyper-reality. Everything is rendered into a propagandistic symbol to be memetically digested without any real interface with the reality of flesh and blood. Like this, even war is reduced to mere shadow puppetry on the walls of Plato’s cave.

Needless to say, the subjugation of the spiritual to this quantitative and technical world would be its death knell, an effective inversion of the traditional religious worldview at the service of something that is entirely less than human; of a lower level of existence than the one in which we currently operate. Infra-human influence creeping in through fissures from a dismal future in order to manifest the malformed figure of the anti-chakravartin.

With this in mind, I encourage everyone to approach the A.I. spiritualities that will certainly rear their head in the near future with utmost skepticism, for they cannot be anything other than the seeds of supreme delusion, driving us away from the true principal unity and further into the ignorance and depravity of the Latter Age.

Conclusion: The Auspicious Kalpa

“When we advance a single step for the sake of the great dharma, then with that step, the ground of this age [of unification] unfolds before us.

This much is certain.”

-Chigaku Tanaka, from “Nichirenshugi Kyogaku Taikan”

After these many pages of seemingly pessimistic critique around modernity, it has now fallen on me to close up this work by offering up possible solutions for what I have outlined as our societal ills. This is by no means a simple matter, as said ills cut to the very bones of our post-industrial civilization, but I will attempt to offer at least a general overview of what I believe to be the best path forward.

I. An Act of God

When tasked with coming up with scenarios that may possibly derail his grim predictions regarding the future of mankind, Jacques Ellul gave three in his forward to the revised edition of his book “The Technological Society”:

1. “If a general war breaks out, and if there are any survivors, the destruction will be so enormous, and the conditions of survival so different, that a technological society will no longer exist.”

2. “If an increasing number of people become fully aware of the threat the technological world poses to man’s personal and spiritual life, and if they determine to assert their freedom by upsetting the course of this evolution, my forecast will be invalidated.”

3. “If God decides to intervene, man’s freedom may be saved by a change in the direction of history or in the nature of man.”

I concur with all three of these proposed scenarios, but it’s the third that I wish to focus on. While it may sound to the typical irreligious person like the least possible of the three, as a Buddhist, I cannot help but believe in divine intervention, although perhaps not in the conventional sense of the term. Rather it is the Buddha-dharma that is the “divine intervention,” as Shakyamuni Buddha came to deliver us the mystic law which has existed since the very distant remote past.

Some explanation is in order…

II. The Lotus of the True Law

There is plenty of talk among scholars regarding the origin of the Mahayana Buddhist scriptural canon which, as far as we have been able to discern through historical analysis, only entered into popular usage hundreds of years after Shakyamuni’s death. While the genius 2nd century monk Nagarjuna is often credited with their popularization, even this detail is shrouded in uncertainty. Academics pour over ancient manuscripts hoping to unravel the mystery behind these texts, but what such scholasticism cannot tell us is exactly what the Mahayana doctrine represents, as this is a matter beyond the bounds of the purely material.

An illustration: In the seventh chapter of the Lotus Sutra, there is section where Shakyamuni tells of a Buddha named “Great Universal Wisdom Excellence,” who lived in an era so far in the past that “it is impossible by applying the rules of arithmetic to find the limit of those hundred thousands of myriads of Æons, so long, so inconceivable, so immense is the number of Æons which have elapsed since [his passing].”

Nichiren writes in his book “The Selection of the Time” that after this Buddha’s enlightenment, “he remained for a period of ten small kalpas without preaching a single sutra. Thus the Lotus Sutra says, ‘Having taken his seat, ten small kalpas pass.’ And later, ‘The Buddha knew that the time had not yet come, and though they entreated, he sat in silence.’”

When the time had finally arrived, he gave many teachings which set countless beings on the path to liberation, but they were not the true law, and so his sixteen sons, who had become his disciples, prayed for “the law with a view to supreme, perfect enlightenment.” Hearing their pleas, Great Universal Wisdom Excellence Buddha finally expounded the Lotus Sutra for “eight thousand Æons [i.e. kalpas] without interruption.” The sutra states (per H. Kern’s 1884 translation):

Subsequently, monks, the Lord Mahâbhigñâgñanâbhibhû [“Great Universal Wisdom Excellence”], the Tathâgata, etc., viewing the prayer of those novices at the lapse of twenty thousand Æons, amply and completely revealed the Dharmaparyâya called ‘the Lotus of the True Law,’ a text of great extent, serving to instruct Bodhisattvas and proper for all Buddhas, in presence of all the four classes of auditors.

All of these sixteen sons would then go on to attain Buddhahood, with the sixteenth being a prior incarnation of Shakyamuni Buddha himself.

Reading through this story with a mind thoroughly cemented in conventional logic, it first sounds nonsensical. Why is a book telling us about a Buddha in the distant past who also recited a book of the same name? Surely it can’t be the same text, right? But the reason for this detail becomes abundantly clear when we consider the purpose of the story.

What the tale of Great Universal Wisdom Excellence tells us is that the wisdom of ultimate unity communicated through the Lotus Sutra has existed since the far remote past, rising up to the surface and blossoming forth when the time is ripe in order to save sentient beings and aid them in attaining complete enlightenment.

Thus when Shakyamuni was born into our world and reached enlightenment at the age of thirty, he waited forty more years before preaching this wisdom in the form of the Lotus Sutra which currently survives. This is the “divine intervention,” so to speak, of the supreme mystic law, expounded at just the right time and kept safe over thousands of years in order to be propagated far and wide in our Latter Age. In my view, we do not have to wait for an act of any divine being, for it has already happened; the stage has been set and everything has unfolded according to plan. From this point on, the rest is up to us.

III. The Two Flaws

But before we can get there, I should establish what makes the Lotus Sutra so special. “If the Hokekyo [i.e. the Lotus Sutra] is not contained in Buddhism, then, even though there exist therein seven thousand Scriptures, all these books are but contradictory teachings,” wrote Kishio Satomi in his Nichirenist text “Japanese Civilization: Its Significance and Realization. He continues: “Therefore when a man desires to make a study of Buddhism, it is absolutely necessary for him to learn the position of the Hokekyo in all Buddhist Scriptures.” Satomi is not being hyperbolic in describing the sutra’s importance to East Asian Buddhist doctrine.

In the Mahayana teachings preached before the Lotus Sutra, the Buddhist paths were split into “three vehicles.” The first were the “shravakas,” or the “voice hearers,” those who left home to join Shakyamuni Buddha’s sangha. This group includes Ananda, Shariputra, Maudgalyayana, and the other figures often referenced in Buddhist scriptural texts. The second vehicle is the “Pratyeka-Buddha,” or “solitary Buddha,” who are negligible in that although they achieve a certain level of realization, they cannot teach others and thus merely extinguish themselves. The last and highest revered of the three in Mahayana scripture are the “bodhisattvas,” beings who, although they are close to supreme realization, put off their enlightenment in order to help countless beings on Earth (which is named “Saha,” or “the world of endurance,” in Buddhist writings).

Many of the Mahayana sutras worked to establish the superiority of the bodhisattvas over the others, going so far as to deny that anyone of the former two vehicles could ever attain perfect enlightenment. This caused Shakyamuni’s Shravaka followers, who had abandoned their previous lives, great distress. “When we stop to consider, we note that, of the great voice-hearers, some were originally from non-Buddhist Brahman families, or were leaders of various non-Buddhist orders who had converted kings to their teachings and were looked up to by their followers,” Nichiren writes in his text “The Opening of the Eyes.” He continues:

Others were men of noble families or the possessors of great wealth. But they abandoned their exalted positions in life, lowered the banners of their pride, cast off everyday clothing, and wrapped their bodies in the humble, dingy-hued robes of a Buddhist monk. They threw away their white fly whisks, their bows and arrows, and took up a solitary alms bowl, becoming like paupers and beggars and following the World-Honored One. They had no dwellings to protect them from the wind and rain, and very little in the way of food or clothing by which to sustain life. Moreover, all the people of the five regions and the four seas of India were disciples or lay supporters of the non-Buddhist teachings, so that even the Buddha himself was on nine occasions forced to suffer major hardships.

For men who had sacrificed so much in their search for wisdom, to learn that they were still so far from their goal must have been absolutely heartbreaking. Not only this, but they had to listen to Shakyamuni Buddha constantly trumpet the utter superiority of the bodhisattvas, most of whom were from other worlds, and thus had nothing to do with the sangha that these men had helped build. “Thus we are told,” writes Nichiren, “that the sound of the Venerable Mahakashyapa’s weeping and wailing echoed throughout the major world system, that the Venerable Subhuti was so dumbfounded that he almost went off and left the alms bowl he had been carrying, that Shariputra spat out the food he was eating, and that Purna was berated for being the kind who would put filth in a precious jar.”

But like a cool rain on parched, dry land, the Lotus Sutra wiped away this trinity, promoting instead the “one vehicle,” and prophesied eventual Buddhahood for all of the Buddha’s followers, including (much to the astonishment of everyone in the Lotus Sutra assembly) an ex-sangha member named Devadatta who made several attempts on the Buddha’s life while trying to usurp his position and consequently fell into the lowest depths of hell (“Avici,” or “Relentless/Incessant Hell”). Thus the idea of universal “Buddha-nature” was firmly established, permeating and unifying all “ten worlds” of Buddhist cosmology (Hell, hungry ghosts, beasts, humans, demi-gods, gods, shravakas, pratyeka-Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and Buddhahood) and Shakyamuni Buddha’s seeming contradictions in prior sutras were all rectified.

In order to drive this home even further, Shakyamuni later seats himself next to the ancient Buddha Prabhutaratna (Jpn: Taho Nyorai, 多宝如来) in an illustration of the unity of the known and the knower; a teaching on the true principal unity of all things. The entire world of Endurance, from the highest heavens to the deepest, darkest hells, and from the remote past to the distant future, is ultimately one with the true mystic law.

Master Zhiyi of the Chinese Tian-tai school wrote that the first of the two principle flaws of the pre-Lotus Sutra Mahayana teachings was: “Because the Ten Worlds are separate from one another in these teachings, they fail to move beyond the provisional.” This is ameliorated through the Lotus Sutra for the reasons outlined above.

But the Lotus Sutra is a far more radical text than this, turning the very fundamentals of the Buddhist faith on their head. While the traditional narrative around Shakyamuni Buddha was that he left home at the age of 19 and attained enlightenment at 30, the Buddha denies this in the sutra’s sixteenth chapter (often referred to as the Life Span Chapter), stating: “it has been immeasurable, boundless hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, millions of nayutas of kalpas since I in fact attained buddhahood.” Nichiren explains:

When we come to the “Life Span” chapter of the essential teaching, the belief that Shakyamuni attained Buddhahood for the first time [in India] is demolished, and the effects [enlightenment] of the four teachings are likewise demolished. When the effects of the four teachings are demolished, their causes are likewise demolished. “Causes” here refers to Buddhist practice [to attain enlightenment] or to the stage of disciples engaged in practice. Thus the causes and effects expounded in both the pre-Lotus Sutra teachings and the theoretical teaching of the Lotus Sutra [chapters 1 through 14] are wiped out, and the cause and effect of the Ten Worlds in the essential teaching are revealed. This is the doctrine of original cause and original effect. It teaches that the nine worlds are all present in beginningless Buddhahood and that Buddhahood exists in the beginningless nine worlds.

This not only reinforces what we discussed earlier regarding the eternal nature of the Lotus Sutra wisdom, but puts aside the “provisional” transformation Buddha of the physical world and lets Shakyamuni expound the Lotus doctrine as the eternal Buddha instead. Zhiyi writes that because the previous scriptures “teach that Shakyamuni first attained enlightenment in this world, they fail to discard the Buddha’s provisional status.” Because the Lotus Sutra meets this second requirement, its authority is solidified and its central teaching of sublime unity is rendered absolute.

IV. The Holy Altar

But such wisdom is, of course, completely useless if it is not put into practice and made manifest in human existence. Thus it is through this supreme law that both Nichiren and the 20th century Nichirenist thinkers, like Kishio Satomi and his father Chigaku Tanaka, wanted to actualize change throughout not only Japan, but eventually the entire world.

The latter, through a comprehensive study of Nichiren’s writings, formalized a doctrine they called “the Holy Altar” (Jpn: Honmon-no-Kaidan, 本門戒壇) which could essentially be described as the “religionization” of the nation state or, as Nichiren described in his 1282 letter now entitled “On the Receiving of the Three Great Secret Laws”: “When the secular law and the Law of the Buddha are fused and in mutual accord,” culminating with the establishment of a national ordination platform.

Chigaku Tanaka, the founder of Nichirenism, interpreted this idea literally, stating that “it means actually building the ordination platform where the people of… the entire world will perform repentance and eradicate their sins.” Before this could be accomplished, however, the fusion of the “secular law” and the “law of the Buddha” would need to be accomplished to usher in what he called the “Age of Unification.” This process would begin by working to convert the rulers to the Buddha-dharma. He writes in his essay “Nichirenshugi Kyogaku Taikan,” or “An Overview of Nichiren-shugi Doctrinal Studies”:

…first government must be subsumed within Buddhism, and then Buddhism must be applied to government. If Buddhism were first merged with government without “awaiting the [proper] time,” that would subordinate the transcendent dharma to worldly matters and end up in catering to political authority. In the merger of government with Buddhism (ōbutsu myōgō) that is to be achieved by the original disciples of the constantly abiding primordial Buddha of the Lotus Sūtra, the ruler’s dharma must first be made to abide securely in the spirit of the buddha-dharma. Then, when the two have merged, the true Eagle Peak, the actual realm of Tranquil Light (jakkō), will manifest in this land.

In order to elaborate more sufficiently, I would like to reproduce a lengthy passage from Satomi’s work “Japanese Civilization: Its Significance and Realization,” as his elegance in explaining this particular topic far exceeds my own:

According to Nichiren, the heavenly paradise [the “realm of Tranquil Light” mentioned in the passage from Tanaka] has not an allegorical existence, but is the highest aim of living beings in the living world, in other words, it must be actually built on the earth. For such a fundamental humanistic aim we must all strive. The true commandment has not its being apart from the vow. If one fully comprehends his thought, and will strive for it, then the signification of one’s life will be realized. This thought is the most important idea of Nichiren’s religion, and, in fact, the peculiarity of Nichirenism consists therein. For him, to protect and extend the righteousness over the world, through the country and to everybody is the true task of life. Consequently, he tested what would be the most convenient way of realizing such an ideal in the world, and he found the country for it.

The country or the state, of course, is the secondary production of human life because of the order of its origination, but as a matter of fact, with regard to our present civilized world, individual beings are preceded by the country. With regard to the method of salvation, the country must be classed as the unit. All existing methods therein are in all probability mere individual standards; on the contrary it is the country or the state standard as regards Nichirenism.

Of course, as we have already mentioned, the country or the state is without doubt the highest civilization, and the world is divided into various countries, and all the individuals, too, are divided into several nations. Consequently, the world in accordance with observation, from a point of view of the methodical system, cannot exist apart from the countries. The individual cannot live without the country, or I should say the individual who does not belong to any country, if such there be, could not demand or be entitled to civilization.

In the religious sense, the unification of the world or the salvation of the world is impossible unless the religion and the country assimilate. Nichiren, therefore, determined the country as the unit of salvation of the world as far as method is concerned. He says:

“Hearken! The country will prosper with the moral law, and the law is precious when practised by man. If the country be ruined and human beings collapse, who would worship the Buddha, who would believe the law? First of all, therefore, pray for the security of the country and afterwards establish the Buddhist Law” (Works, p. 13).

This is a paragraph in his important essay, “Rissho Ankoku-ron” or “An Essay on the Establishment of Righteousness and Security of the Country.” He discoursed on the relation between the country and religion in this essay and sent it to the Hojos Government at an early date as an intimation of his religious movement; but this thought fully developed by degrees and eventually the doctrine of the Holy Altar was founded. There is no doubt that Nichiren thus thought of the country as the most concrete basis on which to propagate religion.

[Note: Satomi does not fully explain the passage from Nichiren above, but later on in the original text’s dialogue, it is stated that the “establishment of Buddhist Law” is in fact the true means by which to establish “security of the country,” with Nichiren writing that “if we hope to bring order and tranquillity to the world without further delay, we must put an end to these slanders of the Law that fill the country.” In this sense, the country is indeed the basis on which to propagate religion, but religion is also the basis on which to establish the country.]

The intention of realizing a religious paradise by the purification of each individual might be compared with a person vainly calculating to disprove the decimal system. It would be like fresh and savoury meat being placed on an unclean dish, thereby destroying the flavour of the good meat. However righteous each individual might be, if his environment, which is the country, be greedy, his Attainment of Buddhahood would be, to put it briefly, incomplete.

Simply put, since “the state” represents the “collective,” it is the state that is a primary object of salvation for religion. As Satomi further states: “The country contains various things... the subject and object of sovereignty, diverse societies, education, law, military force and economical power, etc. etc. These things have a concrete influence on the nation.” Is there anyone who can disagree that instruments of such incredible power as the government’s military, economic, and educational apparatuses are worth neglecting as the beneficiaries of supreme wisdom?

It would, at the very least, be impossible to argue that the aforementioned institutions are entirely devoid of guiding philosophy (although some of the more Liberal-minded among us may be tempted to attempt such a farce). As we have already covered in immense detail, the technical moral axis of efficiency is always at play, which includes that economic drive for ever-increasing profits and funds. There is indeed a guiding moral compass, but it is one only of pure quantity; ultimately infra-human in its trajectory.

Upon hearing this, some may repeat the old Capitalist aphorism that “greed is good,” and explain that the rising tide of corporate profit lifts up all boats, but this is a stifled materialist way of viewing the world, and has become less convincing as the spiritual and psychological dysfunction of our physically comfortable modern lifestyles has begun to rear its ugly head. Should corporate profit and upward trajectory in GDP fail to ameliorate this state of affairs, where then will you turn?

The mindset described above is called by Satomi “the food-standard,” or “the view that reduces a man to a beast.” In his book “Discovery of Japanese Idealism” he writes: “it is the outcome of the impulse of material desire which craves for equality and freedom, nay the superiority of economical life being the material and actual view of life. That is the view of life from the food standpoint.”

This materially-fixated mindset is at the core of both Capitalism and Socialism, and can also ironically be said to have emptied both governmental philosophies of their content after being instrumentalized by the forces of technique. It is, in essence, the reigning spirit of the Latter Age. In order to better explain the concept, allow me to introduce a parable…

V. Theory of the Beginning

In the Dirgha Agama Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha tells of the very beginnings of human civilization. Having been reborn here from the heavens, the first peoples still retained their supernatural powers and luminous forms. Shakyamuni states:

Though there were distinctions between male and female, noble and ignoble, and those of higher and lower rank, they had no names to distinguish themselves, and since they were born along with other beings they simply called themselves sentient beings.

Eventually, the kindness of the earth produced for these beings a sweet mud-like nectar, which tasted like honey. The beings, after tasting it, became addicted, and began shoving handfuls of it into their faces. Overtaken by craving, the once glorious first men lost their supernatural powers and divine radiance, and their bodies became more solid and rough. This caused differences in appearance and attractiveness, leading to conflict among them.

While the humans quarreled and bickered, the nectar disappeared and was replaced with a new growth from the land, one which was said to resemble a thin rice cake. While this food was also delicious, the early humans mourned the loss of their precious nectar with much grief. Regardless, they needed to subsist on something, so they ate the new growth instead. This process repeated itself several times, with the final “growth” being rice.

Still overtaken by desire, the humans overharvested the rice, and their field “became barren and weed-ridden, and finally it began to produce only husks. Once cut, [the crops would] not grow again, leaving only withered stubble.” They once again lamented before coming up with a plan: to avoid future overharvesting, they would divide up the land into plots and assign them to different owners.

This indeed worked well for a while, but problems inevitably sprang up. For instance, men overtaken by jealousy upon viewing neighboring plots began stealing crops from their fields. Thus men created laws and punishments in order to maintain societal harmony, but they knew this would not work unless there was someone overseeing the legal process. For that, they required governance, so they appointed a ruler. Shakyamuni continues:

So they chose a person who was tall and physically impressive, handsome, and who carried an aura of authority. They said to him, “We want you to become our elected leader to protect those in need of protection, commend those worthy of praise, and also to punish those who should be punished. Each of us will collect a portion of our rice harvest to make up your stipend.” Then the person chosen by the community assumed the role of chieftain and began to dispense praise to those worthy of praise and punishment to those in need of punishment. Thus the word nāyaka (“people’s guide”) came into being.

A literal reading of this tale may cause some confusion due to its somewhat simple fairytale nature, but reading with Satomi’s statements about the “food standard” in mind brings its primary point into stark focus. It was, after all, craving and excessive focus on the food which led to a decline in virtue and sowed division among the first men.

Yet it must be noted that, in contrast to Francis Fukuyama’s view of a theoretical “first man,” whose humanity is defined by his violent struggle to become “master” over others, the Buddha’s story depicts man as being originally in a supra-human state of divine unity. Rather than being elevated over the animal kingdom through his division and violence, he is instead brought low by it, joining the beasts in his insatiable cravings. And rather than a source of anguish, the “master” is ultimately appointed to ameliorate the sufferings of this bestial condition by restoring virtue. It is, in a sense, an inversion of Fukuyama’s proposed mythology.

VI. The Chakravartin

While most Liberal-minded modern Buddhists may bristle at the Nichirenist emphasis on the importance of religion in matters of the state, it is well backed up in scripture like the Benevolent King Sutra, which we covered in the chapter on Buddhist cyclical time. Also of note is the Golden Light Sutra, which claims that, should rulers of nations reject the dharma and fail to listen attentively to the sutra, “the flavor of its amrta will be abandoned, the continuity of the true Dharma will be destroyed, there will be no magnificence and power, the lower existences will increase, devas and humans will diminish, and beings will drown in the river of samsara.”

Furthermore, the Four Heavenly Kings, those brilliant deities who are the most powerful divine defenders of virtuous nations, will turn away in disgust. They “will abandon that land and will have no intention to defend it and protect it,” thereby letting the kingdom fall to ruin and be plundered by foreign invaders. It is obvious that both of the sutras mentioned above were composed with rulers in mind as their primary audience, and they stress the necessity of such rulers cultivating proper virtue and accepting the Buddha-dharma.

But I’m sure some may not be satisfied with these citations. There is, after all, an attitude of irreverence towards the Mahayana canon in some circles. However, a similar theme can be found even in what these people consider to be the “earlier” texts.

For instance, the Dirgha Agama Sutra (the same text from which I borrowed the above story regarding the first humans) tells of a figure named the “chakravartin,” or the “wheel-turning king,” who is endowed with seven precious treasures: “the golden wheel, the white elephant, the dark blue horse, the divine gem, the jadelike queen, the [gentleman] householder, and the military commander.” Under the rule of this king, the land itself is said to become a paradise, with the sutra text reading:

When the cakravartin is in command of the land of Jambudvīpa [i.e. our world], the terrain is even, having neither thorny plants nor pits or ditches, nor any bumpy protrusions at all. There are no poisonous creatures such as mosquitoes, gadflies, bees, grubs, flies, fleas, snakes, or water lizards. Sand and rocks, forming inscriptions, automatically sink into the ground, while gold, silver, and precious gems rise to the surface. The four seasons are harmonized into a gentle calm state that is neither hot nor cold. The soil is soft and malleable, with no filth or defilement.

The plants all grow thick with flowers, rice and other crops become plentiful of their own accord, sprouting without husks, and the grass resembles a cushioned carpet. “Clean and pure, each breeze gently caresses one’s body, creating a most delightful sensation,” says the sutra.

But all of this does not come on its own. “So long as the cakravartin governs justly there is never a cause of grievance,” the sutra continues. It is with great virtue that the wheel-turning king must lead, attending to their needs and well-being “just as a father is concerned for his children.” When other kings come to the chakravartin for guidance, he tells them:

“Your kingships rule these countries on the basis of the right Dharma, so that neither injustice nor wrong action can take place in your countries. May your kingships adhere to the vow of not taking life, and do not permit any of your subjects to commit murder, theft, or sexual abuse, or speak harshly or deceptively, or to speak falsehoods, or to indulge in frivolous sycophancy while holding wrong views, a covetous frame of mind, and malicious intent. I say that these [ten] principles encapsulate my governance.”

It is ultimately still the Buddha-dharma which acts as the guiding light for the chakravartin’s reign, and so it is clearly established in even these supposed early texts that a ruler is expected to emulate such a religiously-minded attitude towards leadership. But what exactly would such a reign look like in modern day, when technological society has completely conquered the globe? This is not at all a simple matter, especially because there has been, as far as I’m aware, no comprehensive effort towards such a thing.

However, Kishio Satomi, in his book “Discovery of Japanese Idealism” outlined what he considered the correct paths for countries across the world to take in the future, and gave different explanations for the various facets of society. He began, of course, with the most important component: the state. He writes:

In short, the State which undertakes the task of cultivating and completing human virtuous nature, positively and synthetically as its mission and characteristics, is the State which includes the absolutism of righteousness. That State is the organ for uniting all aims and intentions which cultivates, realizes, and completes the universal valid true self and true personality. In other words, the foundation and purpose of the State consists in the objective realization of the divine nature, which is the highest value of the universal valid true self.

Pursuing this, however, necessarily entails the “subjugation” of the commonly held view of the state as a mere instrument of satisfying material needs (which it is not regardless). Not a small feat, by any means, especially considering that all of the wings of government must join in the mission. “Realize the spirit of religion in international trade, in diplomacy, in politics, and so forth,” says Satomi. “When religion becomes the principle of human life, true significance of religion will be realized for the first time.” The realm of philosophy too must move beyond the restrictions of empiricism and “open a new realm in the very complication of the present society, fixing its eyes on vital social experiences and beings.”

Another important consideration is science, on which Satomi writes: “the fact that science is utilized for war or capitalism is the improper use of science.” Indeed, capitalism and war seem to be the primary drivers of technological innovation, but both are firmly rooted in the food standard. Before this can be improved, we must harness new spiritually healthy motivations for scientific advancement. Only then can we work towards a more harmonious relationship with science and technique, one which does not exacerbate and exploit animalistic human desire or jeopardize humanity’s continued existence. This includes the future applications of artificial intelligence, which is a technology that I am not against in principle (and in fact I have utilized in some of my own creative endeavors), but is very susceptible to misuse, as indicated by the previous chapter.

A couple considerations of my own which I believe to be pertinent to America’s current circumstances: Medicine, one of the greatest applications of science and perhaps the crowning achievement of the modern world, will one day need to decouple itself from the corporate for-profit model, as its relationship to economic concerns has been the source of much dysfunction. We need only to turn to developments like dubious “gender affirming” procedures or America’s opioid crisis to see the havoc that can be unleashed through the prioritization of profit over proper care. Combined with the egregious cost of medical care in America, it has become abundantly clear that this state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely. Medicine, even more so than other scientific fields, needs to be guided first and foremost by virtue and sacred compassion.

Public education will also need to be heavily retooled, as the standardized model currently in use is clearly not sufficient. Higher education as well is flailing, with countless young adults now graduating under the weight of crushing debt that they are no longer able to pay off via their devalued degrees. I think it’s fair to say at this point that the liberal education model has lost any sense of prestige it once had, and the concept of the university should be reassessed. In the future, I would ideally want to see the emergence of modest Buddhist-run schools and colleges here in the West which can provide affordable education by using modern technology in beneficial ways; a dream that is, without a doubt, a very long way off, but I am hopeful that it can eventually be realized.

Satomi closes out the aforementioned section of his book with the following passage:

In short, religion must become the actual power and principle of the reconstruction of life and the world which are vital and putting aside the vacant conception of God and nominal idealism. In order to attain such an existence, religion itself must become the principle of the unity of the three mental elements and the leader of the individual, home, society, state, and the world, which means the generalization of religion into every aspect of life. The difference between the religion which has to be reconstructed and the religion which is awakened consists in these attitudes towards actual life.

Whoever can accomplish all of this fulfills the role of the wheel-turning king, and will bring his nation closer to realizing the Buddha’s Pure Land on Earth. What exactly this looks like is not clear as of yet. Even Chigaku Tanaka, the mind behind the Nichirenist movement, did not venture a detailed description, instead writing:

In [the] age of unification, morality, society, and government will be unified in the same manner as thought and religion, but there is no telling, specifically, what that unification will be like. When the time comes, assisted by the power of the Buddha’s original disciples, the most perfect unification shall surely come about.

However, it is abundantly clear to me, and hopefully to some of my readers at this point, that such a development could only be a change for the better.

VII. Next Steps

But this is all just a fuzzy outline of a theory that I have provided out of necessity. It is not something actionable to any significant degree, and developing it to such a point would be a lengthy undertaking in itself, likely spanning years of hard work and research and countless pages, and requiring the input from an entire group of well educated like-minded individuals. In other words, what we need is a spiritually-motivated intellectual movement full of driven people. The phrase “tall order” would be an understatement…

But we’re starting at ground zero here, with no substantial opposition to the onslaught of soulless desire-driven technological progress. And this is, in fact, my reason for writing this work in the first place. In order to generate a will towards creating an alternative, we first need to understand the problems with the status quo, and so modernity must be thoroughly critiqued. It is only after understanding our dire trajectory that an alternative can be effectively proposed. Considering the amount of young adults who have noticed the unraveling of prevailing narratives and have begun reassessing the foundational assumptions of modernity over the past decade, I believe the time is ripe to make this happen.

This work is my contribution to this effort. Ideally, I would like it to be the catalyst for something bigger; to funnel the growing discontent around modernity away from crushing nihilistic woe and instead towards the creation of a new cultural zeitgeist. Through this endeavor, perhaps we can eventually convert people in positions of actual power to the cause. Not an easy task, of course, considering such individuals would likely be sabotaging themselves (at least in the strictly material sense) should they oppose the current power structures. However, it would ultimately be for the good of both themselves and everyone else. I’m acutely aware that the American upper class has been thoroughly wracked with mental illness and general dissatisfaction for some time, and hopefully I have provided answers as to why in these pages.

Yet even this kind of support is a long way off. Money is funneled to corpo-friendly “Conservatives” and government-friendly “Democratic Socialists,” but I have never heard of big money going to such a religiously-minded dissident political project. It’s worth mentioning that I myself have received absolutely no funds for the work I do, outside of some meager book sales and the small donations I have received from some of my supporters. This is not my job, rather it is something I do with the spare time I manage to scrape together every day. Should anyone else join me in this cause, I would expect it to be under very similar circumstances. There is simply no money in this at the moment.

Should this state of affairs change in the way I’m hoping, we may see a new intellectual movement spring forth and significantly shift the Overton Window, whether said movement is completely in line with my Nichirenist sympathies or not. I believe that this needs to happen if we are to circumvent the “cancellation of the future” and return to an age of optimism, one driven by spiritual well being and the wisdom of principal unity rather than profane science, technique, and material preoccupation.

Until then, however, we are still grasping in the dark, and even the near future is shrouded in uncertainty. All I can do for now is hold on to my own faith in the Buddha-dharma. The Bhadra­kalpika Sutra calls the kalpa of continuance that we currently reside in “The Auspicious Kalpa,” or “The Fortunate Eon,” the age in which a thousand Buddhas will appear. More importantly, our “Latter Age” is when the countless bodhisattvas of the earth from the Lotus Sutra will re-emerge to propagate the true mystic law far and wide.

As Nichiren wrote in his 1280 letter to Niike: “What a joy it is for us to have been born in the Latter Day of the Law and to have shared in the propagation of the Lotus Sutra!”

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo.

END OF “THEORY OF THE END.”