Last night, after my delightful birthday, I sat in bed meditating and the end times, the ones so many Christians are cheering for, hoping to see in their lifetimes, in the next few years preferably, popped into this awareness.

What I heard were the words, ‘What makes you think that we aren’t going through the end times right now?”

If it had stopped there, I would likely have given the default meaning to the words and fallen back on my early training, with lots of questions and a bit of unwillingness to listen. Thank goodness, it didn’t.

What I saw was that these times, while a shift in intensity that is definitely upping the ante, pulling consciousness individually and collectively through the eye of the needle, stripping all that is egoic, unkind, all that can only exist under the umbrella of separation, of its ability to remain, they are not what most think. They are not even what I thought (which was a generous interpretation at best).

Life, embodied, is a moment-by-moment End Times, not just the chaos of these times we are living through but every day since the very first inhale. Each time we look away, each time we act in uncaring, unloving ways, we are thrown into the pit of fire, the Christ within submerged in the muck of our misunderstanding, our misinterpretation, our continued willingness to sacrifice another at the altar of our personal wants and desires.

The fire and the ascension, hell and the return of Christ, is not an endgame. It is not a time we return to or even come into. It is not a becoming at all. It exists with every action taken, with every word uttered, with every clench of the heart, with who we are being breath by breath.

The Christ returns but it is not a return, it is a remembering. It is the remembrance that heaven and earth are not two. They are not separate in any sense. What we do in our human forms determines our experience, fiery hell or Christed bliss.

It is no surprise that the disciples, at least those who wrote of it, missed the point. They listened but they did not have the ears to hear. They were full of fear, quaking as Jesus was tried, convicted, and hung for his crimes against the status quo. They hid. They denied him. They looked the other way, not unlike the way many are looking the other way as immigrants are being handcuffed and shoved into vans.

They wanted him rain down thunder on the armies of society, to take power, to overthrow the government. That was not his message at all. The fact that many of today’s Christians want the exact same things shows that the point is still being missed.

Did Jesus exist? Does it really matter? He may have, or he may have been a parable telling parables. Whoever told the Jesus story was in cahoots with aliveness, understood the deepest meaning of the words, knew without doubt that hurting people, being uncaring and unkind was beyond harmful. They knew It hurts everyone, that it is a world killer, a life ender.

With each moment, the story is being written. We write it with our actions, our experiences, our loving hearts or our hateful anger, with the love unspoken, the cruelty allowed. We create hell or usher in the return of our innocence, the outpouring of the love we are, that we have always been even when it has been distorted with self-protection.

There is a reason being mean and spiteful, angry and judgmental hurts so badly. It is not what we are. It is literally the anti-Christ. It is not what we are, for we are love.

Amaya Gayle is the author of 6 books, the latest Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

Image: ar.inspiredpencil.com