🌀 Out of the Darkness: End Times, Renewal, and the Return of the Real
In a world hurtling toward collapse, we must reclaim the ancient wisdom that light is born from darkness — and that the end may also be the beginning.
The deepest folly of Western culture — now the dominant culture across the world — is its insistence that things are separate. That the good exists here, and the bad over there. That light and dark do not mix.
In this view, the bad must be overcome by the good, as though the world were a simple battlefield, a clean game of light versus shadow. Reality is flattened, stripped of ambiguity, and transformed into a set of problems to solve. This is the logic of instrumentalist hubris — the belief that the world is just a set of things to be controlled and mastered.
But this worldview — this turning of flow into form, of process into static objects — is a historical outlier. Across time and culture, most human traditions have understood things differently.
In Eastern and Indigenous traditions, the world is not linear but circular. It is paradoxical, not logical. Light emerges from darkness. From within the void, new life is born. The dark is not evil — it is generative.
Salvation doesn’t come from a thing but from no-thingness. You move through the nothingness. You keep going until the world transforms before your eyes — while remaining unchanged.
You don’t get stuck in the Western "dark night of the soul." Because in these deeper traditions, hell is never the end.
One of the greatest mystics of the Western 20th century was Walter Benjamin. I’ve just waded through a long biography of him, and what becomes clear is this: religion, properly conceived, has nothing to do with religion as seen through secular eyes.
It’s not a private belief insulated from public life. Not a speculative superstition that floats above the “real” world of material facts.
Benjamin was a materialist — but a radical one. He looked so deeply into the material world that he saw its mystery. Its layers. Its strange enchantments.
He wrote essays on photographs, market stalls, city crowds, and books — the everyday objects of modernity — and made them strange again. He returned spirit to matter and matter to spirit. The binary dissolved. Unity returned.
Benjamin also tore apart the notion of time. Look close enough, and linear time collapses.
The past and future fold into the present. The archaic subverts the modern. The not-yet crowds into the now.
Time is exploded from the inside. Go far enough in one direction, and you arrive at the opposite end.
And this leads us to the moment we are in now.
The end time is upon us. The nuclear moment — when all of past history and all of future possibility collapse into the singular atom of the present. The moment that will decide between existence and non-existence.
Everything is in suspense. All that was, is, and will be — now hangs in the balance.
But in that ending lies a beginning. In the unmaking of the world, we glimpse its re-making. In our slide into hell, we catch a glimpse of heaven.
It is often forgotten that the early Christians believed the world was about to end. That Christ’s return was imminent. This was why St Paul rushed to save souls — and why the early church survived 300 years of persecution.
They had metaphysical grounding. They were anchored in the end.
Today, secular modernity strips us of that grounding. As philosopher Günther Anders warned, our denial of the coming apocalypse drains us of existential resolve. We treat collapse as just another "issue" — rather than the hyperobject it truly is: the everything that changes everything.
And when we do that, we lose the power to birth something new.
Now, reality is about to explode our denial.
Collapse is not coming — it's here. And in the spiritual and material debris, something new is emerging: a resilience not in spite of the end, but rooted in it.
Out of the darkness, the light will come. This is not sentiment. It is fact. It is the convergence of absolute objectivity and absolute faith.
In the end times, the impossible becomes possible.
As we come face to face with billions of deaths, we may also see the greatest acts of love, courage, and rebirth. The greatest coming together of power — to completely remake the world.
The old stories will become the new stories.
We will return to what really is — to the endless depth of the real.
Good will come out of the bad. It will be okay. And the greatest good may yet come out of the greatest bad.
Our job is not to speculate on outcomes. Those days are gone.
Our task now is to become who we truly are. To take hold of courage. To play our part.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
This was meant to be Roger Hallam’s closing message for the Rev21 Convention.
But prison authorities blocked it.
They’ve now banned him from posting on social media altogether.
To keep up with Roger’s work and the revolutionary movement he helped build, follow Rev21 across platforms:
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👥 Reddit: reddit.com/r/Rev21
Update on Roger’s Imprisonment
Roger’s release has once again been delayed — originally expected in March, then May, and now postponed indefinitely. First, his designated home was deemed “unsuitable” for rehabilitation because someone associated with Just Stop Oil was present. Then, following press coverage that included the name of his probation officer (quoted directly in the piece), Roger was placed on a high-risk list — supposedly due to the psychological impact on staff. That probation officer has since been replaced, but the new officer has refused to respond to legal communications from Roger’s team.
It now appears that prison staff are refusing to meet with Roger directly, citing the “risk” he poses to them. His lawyers have written to the prison, but there is no legal requirement for them to respond within a set timeframe, leaving him in a state of limbo.
At the same time, Roger’s ability to contribute to public work has been severely restricted. Prison authorities have blocked over 20,000 words of his writing, and his input into the Convention and our social media efforts has been censored. Despite this, Roger continues to engage with projects through prison phone and email, where possible. He remains deeply committed to the cause and continues to support our work with unwavering clarity and determination.
As always, you can sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with the A22 Network internationally.
