All of mankind’s religious Scriptures have evolved out of the universal base of spiritism that was intuitively sensed and acted upon during the Stone and Bronze Ages.
During those two foundation Ages the analytical half of the human mind was not pre-occupied by complex social issues, thus superstition (meta-normal sense) was far closer to the surface of consciousness than it is today. The spirituality of Stone Age man is known as Animism, which can be defined as a natural acceptance that the universe has a soul.
If we accept two and half million years as a start date for a distinctly human consciousness, and twenty five years as the average span for a generation, then animsim was an entrenched aspect of human consiousness for over 99,000 generations. From a behavioral point of view, animism is imrpinted in our genetic make-up. It can still be observed in practice in remote parts of the world today. ( See my essay on Animism) Modern consciousness experiences animism as “hunches” “de javu” etc
Once mankind made the gradual transition from hunter/gatherer to farmer, perhaps as long ago as 20.000 B.C., the change in social focus demanded by agricultural disciplines initiated the Bronze Age of totemic, or ancestral worship. Shamans acted as spiritual mediums between the living and their dead ancestors. Ancestral worship, mediated by shamans was universally practiced for some six hundred generations.
Farming accelerated the growth of regional populations and by 4000,BC human managment - via petty clan chiefs, each claiming divine origins, using oral-based communication to command - became unfeasible. National scriptures, which explained the common orgins of creation and coordinated clan lineages under a universal godhead, became a developmental imperative. The arrrival of scripture initiated the Iron Age of conscientious industrial craftsmanship, with the population believing in the divine appointment of their royal houses.
Throughout the Iron Age the essential dogmatic nature of orthodox scripture, lorded over under the eye of a wrathful and jealous Godhead, held warring clans together, instilled national unity and ensured a sense of personal conscientiousness. Far more stringent commandments were required for ethical social behavior than in the Bronze Age.
Some twenty five hundred years ago, human population pressures spilled people across borders and forced a new age of consciousness. As internationalism spread, arguments over theological differences went along with it. Religious Protestation reformed our spirituality. The rise of scientific determinism allowed the analytical half of the human psyche to become dominant. Republicism dispelled the belief in the divine appointment of royalty. Man-made constitutions, requiring endless amendments replaced basic scriptual laws. Machines and mass production put conscientious individualized craftsmen out of business. Intuitive inspirations gradually fell into disrepute. Arts were no longer encouraged in the classrooms to keep it alive. Over the past one hundred generations, the concept of atheism has surfaced for the first time human history and the literal content of the Holy Scriptures are held in contempt. Their pre-historic origins are long forgotten.
It stands to reason that all Iron Age religious scriptures, written by a host of regional scribes in a hundred different lanuages, over the last two hunded and fifty generations or so, are mainly intelllectual responces stemming from the common base of spiritual customs that had been established during our foundation Ages.
From this evolutionary perspective it can be argued that the theological differences that distinguish the world’s major and minor religious cults are basically superficial divisions that underly a universal belief in the same Godhead…
Let us examine just how superficial the differences really are in the Family of
[size=150]M[/size] ONGOL
[size=150]A[/size] RYAN
[size=150]N [/size]EGRO
The House of Mongol is the elder brother of the family of MAN. A rather sweeping statement? Then consider this: Chinese mandarins dressed in silk gowns were sipping tea from porcelain cups, and playing chess, while our Aryan ancestors were still running around western Europe, draped in bearskins, raping, fighting and getting drunk on mead.
For 3,000 years, Chinese dynasties flourished under the cultivation of an elegant Taoist/Confucian social order that was revered by peasant and Emperor alike. Four distinct occupational divisions guided an individual through life, from birth to death:
For the first 21 years of life, one was a student, learning the ethical structures of a cultured life and assimilating the accumulated knowledge of the ancestors.
For the next 21 years one was a servant, assisting one’s family and the Emperor in running an ordered estate and thereby repaying society for the lessons learned as a student.
For the third period of 21 years one was a master, wedding, enriching and husbanding the family fortune while teaching one’s offspring to be good students.
For the fourth period of 21 years, one was a sage, retiring to the garden or the mountains, learning to commune with Nature and merge with the Cosmos.
Kung Fu-Tzu (551-479 BC), the Chinese philosopher known in the west as Confucius, who gave us the Golden Rule “do not unto others, what you do not want done to yourselfâ€, formulated a moral and political philosophy based on filial piety, ancestral reverence, righteousness and personal integrity. According to Confucianism, one who possesses these virtues becomes Chun-tzu, a perfect gentleman or gentlewoman.
The keynote of Confucian ethics is Jen (Love), goodness and human-heartedness, virtues that represent human qualities at their best. Jen is manifested in Chun, faithfulness to oneself and others, and in Shu, or altruism.
Around the same time that Confucius was helping to define and refine Chinese culture, an Indian prince of the Sakya warrior class, named Siddhartha Gautama, also known as, the Buddha or the Enlightened One, introduced a social and spiritual philosophy of moral precepts which were later codified as the Four Noble Truths.
The Noble Truths are simple but all-encompassing:
First, life is essentially a process of suffering.
Second, suffering is caused by ignorance and attachment.
Third, suffering can be ended by overcoming ignorance.
Fourth, the path to the suppression of suffering is the Noble Eight-fold Path, which consists of Right Views, Right Intentions, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right-Mindedness and Right Contemplation.
The Buddha also subscribed to the doctrine of Karma, which deals with a person’s actions and their ethical consequences. Human actions lead to rebirth, wherein good deeds are inevitably rewarded and evil deeds punished. Thus neither undeserved pleasure nor unwarranted suffering exists in the world, but rather a universal balance of justice.
The karmic process operates through a kind of natural moral law rather than through a system of Divine judgment. Good actions in a past life lead to less suffering in the present one, until one is finally released from the endless cycle of death and rebirth, and one can enjoy eternal bliss in Nirvana.
All of this taken together represents “Face†the inscrutable aura of the Orient, which Kipling incorrectly stated, Occidentals would never understand.
During the same period that Confucius and the Buddha were busy elevating Oriental culture, Pythagoras in Greece, followed by Socrates and then Plato, were undertaking the cultural refinement of the Occident.
Pythagoras was a philosopher and mathematician who influenced Plato greatly. He established a scientific foundation for mathematics and defined existence itself with his Theory of Numbers. He advocated simplicity in dress and possession, fasting, silence, obedience, and self- examination.
Socrates was a philosopher and sculptor who believed in the superiority of argument over writing. His contribution to western culture was essentially ethical: justice, love and self-knowledge were the basis of his teachings. He believed that all vice is the result of ignorance; that no person is willingly bad, and that virtue is knowledge; those who know what is right will act rightly.
Socrates’ oral arguments, are known to us through the writings of Plato.
Plato’s ethical views were essentially the same as his teacher’s; Virtue is knowledge. To know the Good is to do the Good. He who behaves immorally does so out of ignorance. The moral person is a truly happy person. Because individuals always desire their own happiness, they always desire to do that which is moral.
Plato rejected empiricism. He thought that propositions derived from sense experience, have at most, a degree of probability. They are not certain. Furthermore, the objects of sense experience are changeable phenomena of the physical world; hence objects of sense experience are not proper objects of knowledge.
He was convinced of two essential characteristics of knowledge. First: knowledge must be certain and infallible. Second: knowledge must have as its object, that which is genuinely real as contrasted with that which is an appearance only. That which is fully real must be fixed, permanent and unchanging. He identified the real with the ideal realm of being, as opposed to the physical world of becoming.
Plato’s theory of knowledge is found in “The Republic†in which he distinguished between two levels of awareness, opinion and knowledge. Claims about the physical world are opinions only, some well-founded, some not, but none of them count as genuine knowledge. In the utopian concept of his Republic, Plato is concerned with the question of justice. What is a just state? What is a just individual?
If we had remained solely under the philosophical and moral guidance of Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato, western culture might well have developed along the same subtle lines of social elegance as the Orient did. But it was not to be. Plato’s student, Aristotle, contradicted his master’s rejection of empiricism by stating that nothing was real unless it could be confirmed by the senses.
The Aristotelian concept of reality sent the West sailing off on a technological tangent that gradually discounted the metaphysical values so prized by earlier philosophers; it placed them in a subservient role to that of our scientific quest for material knowledge. The influence of Aristotle’s empirical assertions gained ascendancy during the next two millennia, at the cost of gradual erosion of our ethical conduct.
The technical vigor of his argument was underlined two centuries ago, when the Chinese Emperor, Tao Kuang, protested that England’s trade in opium was undermining the moral conduct of his subjects, and that he would be forced to put a stop to the drug pushing. In response, a single English man-of-war blasted the entire Chinese imperial navy out of the water and kept the trade routes open for the drug lords, and 5000 years of Oriental culture collapsed in an opium daze. Technology triumphed over ethics.
So here we stand today; more or less the morally crippled super-power of the modern world, with enough technological firepower to blow a planet out of existence. We have millions of rebels challenging that power, running around the globe with Uzis and Kalishnikovs, terrorizing us with ideas of chaos.
We do not have enough social order to get Congresses or Parliaments of civilized men to discern the moral difference, between vital social and environmental issues that concern the long-term benefits of man and planet, and the short-term political and economic expediencies that affect their personal careers in office.
And we still have all of the synods of the five great religious orders, each claiming sole access to the Divine ear and a monopoly on granting safe passage to the gates of Heaven.
After all these Ages of struggling to understand ourselves, and the general agreement among all our great philosophers and thinkers that man is essentially good, why does war still exist and why do we continue to fail to achieve a permanent state of peace and happiness among all the houses of Man?
The great problem of the Ages lies - not in the ceaseless effort of our theologians to prove that God exists, for most of mankind through all the Ages has been more or less convinced that He does - but in trying to understand and explain why an omnipotent God allows the Devil to plague our lives. There is never any need to deal with good behavior. All our human management issues have always been focused on how to deal with bad behavior.
In trying to address this problem each of our ancient thinkers could only work within the cultural climates of their times.
Loa Tsu saw good and evil as a dynamic of negative and positive forces acting in the Universe. In this respect he was closer than all others in intuiting the essential constitution of atomic behavior.
Hindus believe that the great Cosmic cycle of the yuga’s reveal an endless wheeling movement of God slowly loosing sight of His own divinity and then gradually and inevitably returning to self realization – only to loose it again – and so on eternally. This view can be somewhat equated with the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory of modern astrophysics.
The Buddha, reasoning from within the influence of Hinduism and its laws of kharma, and the aspirations of suffering individuals to rise in caste and social status via rebirth, intuited that it is earthly desires that create ignorance.
Plato argued on more or less the same lines, saying that reliance on sense input cause ignorance to arise.
Aristotle, by arguing that only the senses could define existence, confused the issue.
The Old Testament of the Hebrews laid the blame of original sin on Eve. This belief introduced the need for a Savior to do battle with the legions of Lucifer.
Jesus was deeply influenced by the long history of the Jews to maintain their ethnic identity via military might. The domination of the mighty Roman Empire and the underground Jewish resistance to occupation forces, allowed him see the endless futility of war and vendetta. His revolutionary solution - of loving one’s enemy and forgiving his trespasses – alienated him from the ruling classes. He spiritually alienated himself from the rabbis and the Jewish Faith by arguing, along with Socrates and Plato, that man was essentially good. “The kingdom of heaven is within.†His added enigmatic statement: “I and my Father are one,†which was meant to further emphasize his claim than man and God are one and the same – has been completely misinterpreted as a literal proclamation by him as being a manifestation of the universal Godhead, incarnate in the flesh. This selfserving interpretation by the leaders of the spiritual movement that originated from his revolutionary teaching, enmeshed with the Old Testament’s twisted doctrine of original sin, has confused the meaning and purpose of Christianity for the past two millennia.
As a consequence of all this, we remain essentially ignorant of the origins of ignorance and continue to war over who the devil is to this very day.
All of our modern social conflicts can be traced back, as Socrates asserted, to the synthetic nature of written communication, which has lent itself to biased interpretation. As human history has been written and rewritten by legions of scribes, each with his own pseudo-intellectual ax to grind, the purity of our earliest cultural disciplines, the tens of thousands of generations of preliterate learning, our oral-based tribal lore and social schooling, has become lost in ignorant translation.
Filial piety has become an alien concept. The great sense of reverence that we once felt for our dead ancestors has become so distorted, that today, we refer to them and their customs as barbaric, savage and heathenish. We view them as club-wielding brutish louts, so low on the human totem pole as to be beneath our contempt. In fact we are infinitely poorer, even severely crippled, by this mutilation of our prehistoric origins; one hopes not permanently so.