place as if you had individuals from experienced it different cultural before. backgrounds and life experiences. Volition, such as 6 Next Page 10 TMI JOURNAL 2012 accomplishing a Writers in this group superhuman feat of include Alan Watts, strength or Walter Odajnyk, endurance. Mark Epstein, and Ken Wilber. Individuation and sense of self, such as feeling your body to be only a small part of yourself or experiencing an identity that existed before your birth. Love,such suchasasunity unity experiences with another or others. 7 Next Page 11 TMI JOURNAL 2012 BOOK REVIEW Felser, J. M. (2011). The myth of the great ending: Why we’ve been longing for the end of days since the
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beginning of time. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads. 271 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Matthew Fike, PhD Whether it is thought that the world will end with extreme weather, as R. Frost (1969) imagines in “Fire and Ice,” or “not with a bang but a whimper,” as T. S. Eliot (1973) proposes in “The Hollow Men,” both poems illustrate the fact that end-of-world thinking pervades the collective consciousness. Figuring out why and what to do about it is the subject of The Myth of the Great Ending: Why We’ve Been Longing for the End of Days Since the Beginning of Time, in which J. M. Felser (2011) synthesizes insights from philosophy, mythology, psychology, and the
new physics into “a useful analysis of a contagion” (p. 3) whose origin in America dates back to William Miller’s prophecy that the world would end on October 22, 1844, but whose provenance lies shrouded in prehistory. What is clear, however, is that the end of the world is not an upcoming historical event but rather a myth that points us toward the possibility of greater self-knowledge and wholeness. Those who subscribe to a literal interpretation, Felser insisted, consume “junk food for the imagination . . . a deadly poison circulating in the body of human consciousness” (p. 196). He urges, as an antidote and alternative, that readers embrace the world of nature around us and our own inner nature, the unconscious. At the heart of the Myth of the Great Ending lies the concept of linear time versus time as circular, a distinction that is present in the plays of W. Shakespeare, whose language provides an apt starting point. Prospero’s phrase in The Tempest, “the dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2.50; qtd. in Bevington, 1992, p. 1531), bodies forth linear time in which the past is distant, whereas Feste’s phrase in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, “the whirligig of time” (5.1.376; qtd. in Bevington, p. 361), conveys not only the cycle of life, but perhaps also the unity of all action. That is, time is a loop