Developing an Eye for the Fifth Epoch

I see it everywhere that I look, like a dream waiting to come into being.

I have been imagining what I came to call the Fifth Epoch since I became Dennis Lee’s partner in 1987. The contrast between the world that we live in today versus what the Fifth Epoch can be is too much for most people to handle. I have watched people go off the deep end, attack anything and everything, including me, when they could not handle that contrast. They go jumping down rabbit holes to nowhere, on those many paths of failure, hoping for some quick and easy solution, which can be life-ruining. My journey has been teaching me patience.

It is easy to look at our world in disgust and horror, get depressed, seek escape into harmful coping mechanisms, propose violent and coercive “solutions,” and the like. Today’s Seattle is little like the city that I was born in. In 1962, when I was four years old and Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, my mother gave me money and a shopping list, I walked a few blocks to a corner store, handed the man behind the counter the list and the money, and walked back home with a bag of groceries and the change. Those days are long gone in Seattle. I only go into Seattle when I have to, as I did last week, for one of the few times this year. On Monday, there was a shooting a few blocks from where my grandparents lived when I was born, and I drove guests past it only a few days earlier. Some of my earliest memories are of their home. Seattle has become a woke hellscape in ways, and as I sit in traffic in Seattle and the surrounding area, I sometimes think to myself, “And they call this civilization.”

However, what I do far more often is think about what life in the Fifth Epoch can be like. The world as we know it will end in the Fifth Epoch, and nobody will miss it. When I walk into a nearby Safeway, which is constantly the site of shoplifting and police incidents (where Steve Ballmer used to get his morning coffee), I often think about how grocery stores will cease to exist in the Fifth Epoch, and almost nothing in the store, especially aisles full of processed food, will exist in the Fifth Epoch.

In the Fifth Epoch that I envision, whatever somebody needs will be immediately delivered to them, wherever they are. Cities as we know them will cease to exist, as will nations, races, ethnicities, etc. Scarcity and fear will no longer be the background hum of our societies, and there will be one global society, as humanity will be recognized as one family.

That is hard to imagine from here, but in everything that I see in my world, I imagine what the Fifth Epoch will look like, how nearly all that I see will cease to exist, and I imagine what will take its place. Holding that vision is all that kept me going at times, and I see it as a dream that is waiting to come into being. That process has helped me over the years, has helped shape my visions of the Fifth Epoch, and the people that I seek will likely need to do something similar.