If we're going to put a date on the end times, Hindu cosmology has the most educated guess. The Kali Yuga (the worst) started around 3,000 years ago and has nearly 430,000 years left. I won't get into details I don't know, but suffice it to say, it's not a bad guess. Many scientists date our fall to the rise of agriculture to around 10,000 years ago. Every local civilization built around 'mining the soil' has collapsed, a global civilization just collapses globally. Give or take, 3,000 years is a fair guess as to when things started going downhill, which we perceived as growth because we were getting there faster. That start of the end date also roughly matches (the also rough) Axial Age, when sages notably started complaining.

If you read Confucius from around 2,500 years ago, he said, “I am not someone who was born with knowledge. I simply love antiquity, and diligently look there for knowledge.” This is terrifying because I'm reading Confucius through like 800 footnotes and have no idea what he's referring to as 'antiquity'. Today feels so much more fallen than the Axial Age, but we seem to have been falling from before then. When you read the ancients it's striking how much they hark back to even more ancient times. Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days is a cover of a cover of a cover, going back to Genesis. Now that we reach the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence, the big question is not really how we avoid judgment day. If you read with any depth into collapse, you'll find that it goes even deeper. The real question is, how long will the punishment take?

The Vedic estimate of 430,000 sounds deranged, but biologically speaking it's actually quite generous. 430,000 years of punishment sounds excessive, until you consider the crime. We have literally killed most of our living relatives, incurring multiple life sentences, at least. Previous mass-extinction events (including those caused by 'previous' life forms) have taken millions of years to regenerate, so half a mil is actually quite ambitious. I'm not arguing that the Hindu cosmology is correct, that's beyond my pay grade, I'm just saying it's an excellent guess. Collapse starting roughly 3,000 years ago and ending well beyond our comprehension matches the rest of the evidence and eminences quite well.

Asking 'what do we do' is like asking a surfer what to do about a tsunami, but I'll indulge it because the ancients offered an answer, which we still completely ignore and even laugh at. The oldest texts—from the Vedas to Confucius—are quite clear about the lack of ritual being the problem. This seems hopeless atavistic to us today, but they keep repeating it and I try to listen. When asked for his elevator pitch on governance, Master Kong (Confucius) refused to the even more ancient sage-king Shun, saying, “Was not Shun one who ruled by means of wu-wei? What did he do? He made himself reverent and took his [ritual] position facing South, that is all,” (15.5). This has always confused me, but I'm pretty sure that's a 'me' problem. Rituals are an ancient programming language which we disregard because they 'don't work', while our works has melted the planet in a few short centuries. We think we're so fucking smart and that we don't owe sacrifice to anybody (or anything), which is really the root of the problem.

Whatever the ancient rituals did, they didn't cause a mass extinction as fast as the spells we call computer programs and laws. Modern technology only 'works' in the sense of summoning demons we can't control and incinerating our own home in a geological blink of an eye. In the moment, this feels great, as all deals with devils do. He really gets you on the interest rate, and we have zero karmic or cosmic savings to fall back on. We haven't offered sacrifice for millennia, the ancients complained about the rituals being neglected back then. Again, I don't understand ritual, but this misunderstanding is telling because I'm a modern moron. One of the better explanations I've seen is from old Dai's Records of Ritual (which I've read only through footnotes). The Elder Dai said,

Ritual guards against what is yet to come, whereas laws are created after the fact to deal with what is already past. This is why the usefulness of laws is easy to see, whereas the reason for the existence of ritual is hard to perceive.

Confucius is actually beautifully non-legalistic and anti-punishment. The Master said “When it comes to hearing civil litigation, I am as good as anyone else. What is necessary, though, is to bring it about that there is no civil litigation at all.” The later commenter Fan Ziyu said, “hearing civil litigation is like trying to fix the branches or stop a river that is already flowing: if you had simply rectified the roots or purified the source, there would simply be no litigation at all.”

When people talk about climate legislation this is what I think of. How do you bind the climate with human laws? We are blinded by our petty power over each other and miss the concept of a higher power above us all. This is the reality that ritual sacrifice connects us to, and we neglected it because incense and bowing are silly. But that's like thinking computer programming is silly because it uses funny symbols and meaningless words. The point of any symbolic activity is what you do with it, and what have we done? What have we lost? What have we forgotten in our hubris? How many hungry ancestors, hungry ghosts, cluster around our shoulders while we're shrugging?

For generations people practiced ritual to keep balance with the world, to keep harmony with the past, and here we are, wildly unbalanced. I don't know if this connection is causal, but in my experience nothing is causal, everything affects everything. I see ritual sacrifice as an attempt to 'balance the books', to give something dear to us as we take. As Naked Capitalism often repeats in a quote I also don't understand, “So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles.

I take the fact that I don't understand ritual as a sign of how corrupted I am, not as a sign that the ancients were somehow 'backwards' and I'm more 'rational'. We forget, these fallen days, that math and grammar were invented for ritual. To make rituals more perfect, to vibe more closely with the gods. We have taken that cosmic frequency and traded it for trinkets which let us feel like gods for a few centuries, before going full Icarus into the ruined earth. We will be the dumbest ancestors, remembered only for our hubris. They'll offer us burnt plastic because we seemed to like it so much.

I suppose I get more mystical as I get more hysterical. As the planet burns, smoke 'em if you've got 'em. I read the ancients for comfort but they tell me to read even more ancients, who I find boring and incomprehensible if I can find them at all. I'm struck that sages from the (arbitrary) Axial Age were already complaining about these being fallen times, and that the Kali Yuga (age) started around the same time. Confucius's contemporaries said, “The world has been without the Way for a long time now, and Heaven intends to use your Master like the wooden clapper for a bell.” What they didn't say was that it was the sound of a bell falling down a mountain. Loud and clear, ringing all the way down.

This searching for sagacity in sages is, in itself, another wrong turn. As the most anti-sage sage Zhuangzi said, “To try to govern the world by doubling the number of sages would merely double the profits of the great robbers. If you create pounds and ounces to measure them with, they’ll steal the pounds and ounces and rob with them as well. If you make scales and balances to regulate them with, they’ll steal the balances and rob with them as well.” Indeed, is this not what all the 'wisdom' of science has done? Is this not what electrifying all the bulldozers will do? Zhuangzi is the best because he's confusing and cantankerous as hell. Once a king tried to make him Prime Minister and he told some weird story about a turtle and said, “Get out of here! I too will drag my backside through the mud!” As Master Zhuang said about wisdom,

How profoundly the love of wisdom disrupts the world! Abandoning the seedlike impulse within them, they instead insist on laborious subservience. Letting go of the peaceful blandness of the purposeless, they instead delight in ideas and plans full of jibber jabber. And how this jibbering and jabbering has already disordered the world!

Look at today, when we try to avoid the consequences of acting smart with more smarts, the pains caused by labor with more labor. We're trying to get out of a hole with literally more digging (mining), which ignores the first rule of holes. Stop! We still think we're flying, even though it should be obvious that we are, in fact, falling. ‘How long the fall?’ is just another idle question from another idle mind. As Master Zhuang said, “Everyone in the world knows how to raise questions about what they don’t know, but none know how to raise questions about what they already know. Everyone understands enough to reject what they consider bad, but not enough to reject what they consider good. This is the reason for the great disorder, which violates the brightness of the sun and moon above and melts away the vital essence of the mountains and rivers below, toppling the ordered succession of the four seasons in between.”

Master Z is, of course, right that we have wrecked the climate with our endless questions and inventions and scientific methodology. We can't unwreck the environment without questioning what we think is good and without losing what we're trying most desperately to save (modernity). As Xenophon said in his ancient Oeconomicus, (via J. Donald Hughes), “Xenophon recognized that Earth has her own justice, a law deeper than human enactments, written in the nature of things. If treated well, she granted prosperity. If treated ill, she would forgive, but only up to the point where the balance tipped, and by then it was too late: floods, famine, disease, and death were inevitably the result.”

You can find this wisdom throughout ancient philosophy, which we ignore to make water wheels and giant political systems and other bullshit that just accelerate the core predicament they were pondering. As the Apostle Paul's said, “The wisdom of this world is foolishness.” And yet we have built a whole worldview around worldly wisdom, and are extremely confused that our views do not actually control the world in. We felt weightless and special because we could go into space, but we never left the gravity of earth at all. The best we ever achieved was free fall, or touching down on a dead moon that presaged what we were doing to the earth. That's all recorded history is, the more you read it. A record of the fall, fingernails scratching down a wall, ending in a splatter of carbon and radioactivity in the fossil record, that's all. If anyone tries to read us 430,000 years hence, that's all they'll see, and if they could read our words, it's at their peril.