Revelation was the first biblical book that I analyzed from a cognitive perspective back in 2016. I was reading the story of the Woman and the Dragon in chapter 12 and it suddenly made cognitive sense. That essay looked at chapters 4-22 while a follow-on essay examined chapters 10-21. These first two essays were both rather limited, but they still represented a major breakthrough in the understanding of Revelation. In 2021, I re-analyzed chapters 4-11 as a detailed prophetic outline of Western history. Ironically, I could not make sense of the seven letters to the churches, which are traditionally interpreted as a prophetic outline of Western history.
These seven letters now make sense, and I have posted a 75 page essay that interprets Revelation 2-3 in detail as a historic and prophetic sequence, guided by the theory of mental symmetry. This essay proposes the following correspondence: Ephesus is the Roman Era, Smyrna is the Medieval era, Pergamum is the Renaissance era, Thyatira is the current scientific era which is now coming to an end, Sardis is the next era in which existing science and technology will be spiritually enhanced, Philadelphia will rebuild society from a spiritual foundation, and Laodicea describes a future uber-consumer society that will trade in spiritual and genetic enhancements.
The discussion of the first four letters quotes heavily from Wikipedia. Unfortunately, it is not possible to quote from Wikipedia when discussing the last three letters because Wikipedia neglects to include any articles about the future. However, it is still possible to gain an understanding of what the future might be like by looking at similar situations in the past. For instance, one can imagine what the uber-consumer society of Laodicea might be like by looking at characteristics of today’s consumer society. It is also possible to compare these letters with what other New Testament books say about these final three societies. I think that the final era will either be followed by or culminate in the Millennium of Revelation 20.
The 75 page essay can be found here.