I won't understand it, he says, because I'm from The Paradigm. To connect to the dream I must first disconnect myself from The Paradigm which has enslaved me for 35 years on Earth. The Paradigm is ambition and greed and war and politics and Deal or No Deal and Coca-Cola and Big Mac meal deals and home mortgages and nine-to-five and the iPhone in my pocket. "You're not exposed to an awful lot because The Paradigm keeps shaping your education. It's really tough for anyone to resist The Paradigm. Few can. Very few people claw their way back from it."

He has secured a lease for this land from the Vanuatu government that he has paid in advance for up to 75 years. "What happens when the lease runs out?" I ask. He looks at me bemused. "There ain't gonna be anything left of this world," he says. "Twenty more years at the outside, that's all that's left for the end of the destruction of this world. Finished." The end isn't nigh. The end is here. "Oh yeah, we're in it," he says. "We're in the end of the world."

We've just passed the first part, purification. The second part will be judgment and execution. "We're in that phase but we're still at the top end where you don't see very much change; over the next 20 years you will see more things occur than you ever would have believed possible. It will reflect the cataclysmic time we have prepared for," Steve says. "The debt in the US is not even ­serviceable. There is no economic reality. Stock markets around the world are at record highs. Commodities are at record highs. Nobody ­realises we are living in hyper-inflation. Some men are making so much money they don't even know how to spend it. And the 99.5 per cent of everybody else is experiencing contraction. The whole of the western world is bankrupt. They're holding it together with glue and image but it will break shortly. It can't ­possibly survive what's happening. And then the major powers, when they lose control of their body politic, will resort to the only thing they have to express their power. You know what that is. This is the way the world ends."

The story is written. Financial collapse brings political collapse brings religious conflict. "Every major urban centre will turn to riot," he says. The world eats, fights, claws, betrays, shoots, stabs and burns its way to the end. While the people of Edenhope wait it out on the living ark at the unreachable edge of the Earth. "We're in a position where we could clothe, feed and shelter ourselves for the rest of our lives," Steve says.

There will be no lease costs because there will be no Vanuatu government. "You will see it," he says. "You're part of the witness group that will watch what is the most astounding period in the history of our species. And you will see it soon."