The End of a Cycle
Traditional doctrines tell us that the world moves through cycles, each cycle beginning with a pristine state. At this point the world is as close as possible to the supreme principle given the conditions of its manifestation. This is the Golden Age of myth, when men were free from wrongdoing and want, and had regular contact with the gods. We are now near the end of a cycle, in the age known in Hinduism as the Kali Yuga. This age is marked by a satanic inversion of values and general chaos and deformity. Once the cycle has reached its lowest point there is a grand reversion. Paradise is regained, and a new Golden Age is born. In the new cycle there is a new humanity, once again in direct contact with the divine. The end of a cycle should be seen as Armageddon, as the end of a world.
But how should this end, this new beginning, be seen? It is wrong to think that gods will take on material bodies and walk about our world, destroying the wicked and blessing the righteous. Nor should we necessarily expect a literal destruction of the earth and end of time.
Regarding the first point, the gods, or metaphysical powers that govern our world, exist apart from it. They operate without passion or contamination, eternally unchanging. When, in ancient times, they were said to become visible, it was not the gods who descended into the material world, but the human viewers who raised their awareness above the material world. Since the gods are without place or extension, they are potentially available to all things; individuals receive the influence of the gods in different degrees only because of their own limiting conditions. And so it is at the end of a cycle: the righteous are those who cut away all bonds and see the world through the eyes of the supreme, as undifferentiated from themselves.
Regarding the second point, the literal end of the world, one must keep in mind that there is no end of time in time. That is, nothing can enter into time and subsequently bring an end to it. And as all material things are necessarily in time, it follows that no material thing or process can bring time to an end. Time cannot be ended with respect to itself, for if its end is defined as that which comes after time, then its end is defined as something that succeeds another thing, and this definition presupposes the existence of time, for it is only in time that one thing succeeds another. Hence the end of time would be in time, and in reality could never be.
This point can be further clarified by using the imagery of horizontal and vertical orientation. Time is an indefinite horizontal expanse, containing the fullness of time-bound entities. Above this expanse is the unchanging incorporeal world. The end of a cycle is not an acting of one thing in the expanse of time on another, but the reversion of things in time to their supra-temporal source. This reversion is a realization of the contingent and illusory nature of all dualistic conceptions. Time is a reflection of eternity, but the mirror and the original object are one and the same. At the end of a cycle material objects are not destroyed with respect to their material nature, for a particular material body being disintegrated or transformed into another material body does not constitute any sort of transcendence. The new humanity sees all material things as they really are, as contained simultaneously in the infinite power of the supreme, and in this way material things could be said to be “destroyed,” except that this very state (that is, being contained in the supreme) has never actually ceased.
One of the clearest explanations of this new Golden Age comes from the Platonic tradition. In Platonic metaphysics, reality is divided into the world of Intellect, and world of Soul, and the world of matter. Pure Intellect is eternal and unchanging. It is the source of all things and possesses all things in potential, or archetypal, form in its infinite power. All individual ideas exist in the pure Intellect, but this Intellect is still a unity. It is unchanging because it knows itself, and hence all things, simultaneously. Souls are also eternal, but they do experience change. They animate the material world, and undergo periods of degeneration and purification. Material objects are both changing and of limited duration. They receive forms, the ideas contained in the Intellect, but hold them for a limited time before chaos reasserts itself and form is lost. The Platonists identify the Golden Age with the realm of Intellect, and hence the goal of their philosophy is a return to the Golden Age, for they advocate withdrawing the soul from the material world and lodging it in the pure Intellect. Here the philosophers see temporal things from the viewpoint of eternity, just as normal men conceive the eternal in terms of temporal duration.
This should shed some light on the advent of the prophesied new Golden Age. After the final destruction of the old, the new humanity will be a race of philosophers (or of sages, or heroes, whichever term is preferable), full of wisdom and justice, for whom each thing in the world is a symbol pointing to the supreme. It will be noted that when identified with pure Intellect the Golden Age is outside of temporal manifestation, and hence that it is nonsensical to talk about its duration. Rather it is a matter of how long human beings can maintain effective contact with the timeless, and it is more accurate to speak of the return to the Golden Age than of the return of the Golden Age. However, it must also be acknowledged that although the return to the pristine state is a spiritual, not a material process, physical destruction of very great magnitude in our natural and artificial environment may very well occur in conjunction with the spiritual reversion.
And finally, although humanity as a whole may be forced by the conditions of the Kali Yuga into spiritual degeneracy, those very few willing to cut away everything can gain the Golden Age at any time.