Apocalypse

Prachar from Australia once related how he wrote 40 poems on the occasion of his 40th birthday, and presented them as a gift to his teacher, Sri Chinmoy. Sometime later, he was pleasantly surprised to find that Sri Chinmoy had arranged for the collection of poems to be published, and had even given the title a name - Apocalypse.

The title struck people as unusual - when you look at the poems, there's nothing about them that suggests the world is going to collapse around our ears at any moment, and Prachar himself can hardly be described as a sackcloth-and-ashes doom merchant (although I've no way of knowing what he gets up to the other side of the world :) )

However, the mystery is now resolved, for me anyway. The proper meaning of 'apocalypse' is not actually the end of the world. It actually derives from the Greek word for 'to lift a veil' and it it's original sense it means a revelation of knowledge, or a glimpse into the future privy only to the chosen few. The misconception of course arises from the biblical book of Revelations, where the two meanings of apocalypse are very nicely commingled together...

Sri Chinmoy has always been admired by his students for his grasp of the English language (I doubt many of us would have come across the words 'effulgent','tenebrous' or 'cynosure', if it weren't for him) and this is yet another demonstration....