Religious Experience & The End of The World as Time's Horizon

Rudolf Otto attempted to explain the “religious experience”, the feeling of God’s presence as the experience that overwhelms the categories of the mind. God being Infinite, abolishes everything finite, everything petty and arbitrary. The World is for a moment melted away in the absolute majesty of The Lord. This is the feeling of “created-ness”, a sense of dependence for the sole act of existing, the presence of something entirely “Other” from humanity.

This is the Revelation of an entirely “Other World”, beyond an insufficient or “fallen” world, and thus, it is the dawning of an entirely New World.

This phenomenon is called “Mysterium Tremendum”, the experience of finitude overwhelmed by infinity, inducing a kind of Sublime Terror. Kant compared this to the cosmic vertigo that overcomes someone when looking out at a boundless landscape (the ocean) or up at the night sky. The boundlessness that exceeds the limits of possibility.

One must ask, why does this phenomenon happen at all? What is the larger schema here within a framework of Divine Providence? This phenomenal experience pre-exists in the mind for a reason, because the “Fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom”.

The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan

“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” (John 15:25)

Christianity is a religion of paradoxes and ironies, and approaches the world in this way. Christianity is a religion of abolishing the world as it is, and this begins by rejecting one’s own life so one might save it, and rejecting the world so one might receive eternity.

The Sublime Terror of religious experience is the revelation that the world is not the final reality. The psychological implications of this extend to earthly powers as being arbitrary and illegitimate, and the political-economic arrangements of the world as being always arbitrary and temporary.

This is why Christianity remains tightly controlled, because the most obvious conclusion of Christianity is that The World’s meaning structures remain in a state of permanent illegitimacy until the coming of New Jerusalem. It remains under control by the “god of this world”.

This Kingdom of Satan brands itself as legitimate, final, divinely elected, metaphysically fixed etc.

Time-Generation & The Movement Of The World

The terrifying Religious Experience (Mysterium Tremendum) that God induces onto humanity is a Time-Generator, and the apocalypse of religious experience that mentally abolishes everything is a form of Time-Traveling. When everything is revealed as illegitimate, History and Time have begun moving. The Religious Experience is the liberation out of natural time (cylical time) and into eschatological time.

We could say military-enforced atheism is a method of stalling Time, and The Great Commission is a form of planetary Time-Acceleration.

“Certainly, the fear of God… can become fanatical and act against the state, burning its buildings and destroying its institutions. So the received opinion is that the fear of God should be moderated and should be held with a certain coolness, lest it turn against what is supposed to be protected and maintained by it, and overwhelm it in a storm. Religion has within it at least the possibility of doing just that” - Hegel

The Religious Experience, or Sublime Terror, is revolutionary on an existential plane, as it is Time-Traveling to a post-mortal state. This abolishes the meaning structure in the present.

The Book of Revelation is morbidly fascinating to every generation of readers because its imagery is beyond the bounds of possibility, it is a sort of Sublime Terror. It is political, mystical, personal, religious, social, historical, and cosmic in its depictions of falling stars and destruction of the Sun & Moon. Even the structure of the cosmos itself does not survive The Apocalypse, implying the entire meaning structure of reality is eventually re-arranged. The Cosmos are ultimately illegitimate as they are, and this is truly aweful and mysterious.

Sublime Terror acts as the medium between comprehending the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Antichrist simultaneously. One must experience the overwhelming presence of “The Almighty” in order to comprehend the possibility of a Transcendental Evil, manifested as the collective psychic energy of humanity’s mental illness.