The period from 900 to 200 BCE is called the Axial Age. This was the period of the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jermiah, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mancius and Euripedes. It is in the Axial Age that humanity discovered it's deepest truths. Alas these truths then lead to the perversity that are the religions of the world. While the truth is that every individual is indestructible because he is the microcosm of everything that existed, does exist and will exist, most religious practice is about seeking salvation for the self. Truth is that seeking success for the self is pointless because the self is already the embodiment of supreme success. The Human Project is about the creation of a successful world. Those who connive, trample, ignore, corrupt and slight to achieve the delusion of success, succeed only in besmirching the mirror in which they will one day, worn out by their misdirected endeavours, seek their self. The simple truth is we are all in it together. When the devil takes the hindmost, it is all of us who are cast into hell.
You might think it would be very burdensome to be bothered about the success of everything and everyone around us.
Au contraire. On those very rare moments that my being grasps the eternal truths, all worries about the rat race and the Joneses fall away and I soar as the magnitude of the Human Project comes into view. So much to do! So little to worry about!
1 comment:
Is it an accident that the two most prevalent religions today were born after the Axial Age? And they don't rise to the level of eternal truths and 'oneness' with the supreme, but talk of Paradise as reward for an individual's life well led on Earth?
On another tack, is the concept of 'Failing World' another mirage - merely a phase of a collective kind of cycle of birth an re-birth - the Kaliyug that Hinduism refers to where instead of individual souls in such a cycle, humanity itself follows an over-arching cycle? 'We're all in it together'?
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