World-Historical Interior Evolution, or Earthlings, Get Over Yourselves!

In keeping with the theme of yesterday's non-post about yoga and Christianity, I dug up this early one about the world-historical significance of the developing Anglo-Hindu alliance. It strikes me as pedantic. But at least it's long. I wouldn't recommend it. I'll just post part one and see if anyone expresses interest.

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Under the radar of the MSM, the Bush administration has been working to create a new Anglo-Hindu alliance. It is now the policy, or "Grand Strategy of the United States," to assist India in becoming "a major world power in the 21st century." I consider this a development of potential world-historical significance, which I would define as a point in which vertical energies pour down from above, either to assist mankind in evolving to the next phase or breaking through an evolutionary impasse whereby human beings cannot rise above themselves. My fellow Subgenius readers might think of these as celestial "bursts of slack" that have appeared from time to time, and without which the Conspiracy would be in total control of our lives and destiny.

For example, one world-historical moment is known as the Axial Age, a period of general spiritual awakening between 800 and 200 BC, when all of the initial major revelations of mankind were downloaded: the Old Testament prophets, the Greek mystery schools, the Vedic seers of the Upanishads, Confucius, and Lao Tzu's original Tao te Slack.

If you are Christian, you probably have no difficulty understanding the incarnation of Jesus as a kind of depth charge dropped down into history from on high. The temporal reverberations from that spiritual shaktiwave continue to wash ashore over the present. After all, even if you don't believe in Christ, you are nevertheless the benefactor of his presence, say, in the decisive manner in which he affected the thinking of the American founders.

In Hinduism, an "avatar" refers to an incarnation of the divine. Unlike Christianity, they believe there have been many avatars, and yet, this principle is not really at odds with either Christianity or Judaism. That is, you can think of an avatar as something short of a literal manifestation of the one God; many righteous rabbis and saints would qualify as avatars, not necessarily as a literal descent of the divine, but perhaps as embodiments of an ascent to holiness or to the divine.

Some people are born with a divine mission to accomplish, even if it isn't explicitly spiritual, say, Charlemagne or Alexander. Sri Aurobindo refers to them as vibhutis -- figures who appear on the world-historical stage at precisely the right time and place to either "rescue" mankind or advance it to a new level of moral, political, or aesthetic understanding. These people are often consciously aware of being seized by a transcendent power in order to accomplish a mission. The American founders would obviously be prime examples. Other examples might include Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King, and many others, both detected and undetected by written, "daytime" history (vibhutis often work anonymously, under cover of darkness, so to speak; people become aware of them only on a "need to know" basis).

Evolution requires time and experimentation but also a telos, or meaningful endpoint. If you stand back from world history and view it in the widest possible coontext, you can think of it as a journey out of Africa that began some 60,000 to 75,000 years ago, with various search parties setting out to discover what they could. Diverse cultures and civilizations may be thought if as the embodiments of the discoveries and solutions these groups came up with, some good, some bad, some perfectly awful. Only now are we in a position to call a new meeting to order and compare and contrast what these different groups found in their world-historical journeys. Importantly, this would represent the exact opposite of the U.N., which functions to justify and perpetuate the very worst in mankind.

What I am advocating represents multiculturalism in a positive sense, because it doesn't mean accepting any and all cultural nonsense as beautiful and helpful, as does the left. Rather, our task is to critically examine what various human groups have discovered or developed, and keep the good and throw out the bad. For example, Chinese Maoism? Bad. Chinese Taoism? Good. Chinese food? Even better! The Hindu Upanishads? Sublime. The caste system? Good in principle if allowed to express itself spontaneously, very bad if imposed from the top down. The American constitution? Unsurpassed. American materialism? Troubling, e.g., metaphysical scientism, addiction to fleeting pleasures, etc.

Now, an existential fork in the road took place in mankind's evolutionary journey sometime after the 10th century BC, when both the Torah and Upanishads appeared, signifying a split between what might be called the Abrahamic and Brahmanic traditions.

Since we are wading in it, we are pretty familiar with the path the Biblical stream took, winding its way through Jesus, the late Roman Empire, Western Christendom, the scientific revolution, the American founding, etc. Many if not most readers may not know much about the other stream that began with the Vedas. The reason why this split is so important is because it represented two differing conceptions of ultimate reality, one seeing it as more radically transcendent (the Judeo-Christian stream), the other as immanent in the person (the Vedic stream). (There is actually more than a bit of both in each, but it is a matter of emphasis.)

WARNING: PEDANTRY AHEAD

The word "veda" simply means knowledge. Each of the four Vedas is divided into two parts: work and knowledge. The former deals with myths, hymns, prayers, and instructions for rites and ceremonies -- mantras, incantations, ritual formulas, etc. The second part concerns itself with the highest experiential basis of religious truth. These latter, more metaphysical Vedas are collectively known as the Upanishads (I suppose this is my favorite translation; like the King James Bible, it may not be the most faithful, but it the most beautiful.)

Vedanta represents the esoteric core of Hinduism. Veda-anta actually means "end of the Vedas," and can be taken both literally and metaphorically. That is, the Upanishads not only appear at the end of the Vedas, but also represent the "end" of relative knowledge -- they represent a special kind of knowledge that transcends both ordinary and scriptural knowledge. It is knowledge of the direct experience of ultimate reality.

There are one hundred eight Upanishads, but only ten have come to be known as the principal Upanishads. The literal meaning of Upanishad is something like "sitting near devotedly," but may also be understood as "secret teaching," for this is a kind of oral knowledge that may only be handed down from "one who knows," from a guru who has experienced the ultimate reality to an earnest disciple who seeks it. This is a kind of knowledge that is very much bound up with a radical notion of liberty, for it "destroys the bonds of ignorance and leads to the supreme goal of liberation."

The Upanishads are different than the scripture of the Bible, in that they do not record historical events, revelations, or prophecies, but the direct experiences of the Vedic saints and seers (but sometimes presented in story form, such as a conversation with Death). Their main conclusion -- or "I-witness" testimony -- is that the ultimate reality beyond name and form, or Brahman, the Self of the universe, the eternal I AM, abides deep within each individual, or Atman. Ultimately, Atman and Brahman are One. Well, not exactly. It is perhaps more accurate to say that they are not-two. Importantly, the Atman is not to be confused with our surface ego. Rather, it is the indestructible and changeless Self behind the superficial personality. It is actually located not in the mind but the heart. A Vedantin would consider it the beating heart of the living cosmos.

END PURE PEDANTRY HERE

One of the reasons why the United States represented such an evolutionary advance is that it was the first to consciously embody Judeo-Christian principles. That is, there had been Christian nations, but never before an explicitly Judeo-Christian one. I won't outline the entire argument here, but an excellent book that summarizes the evidence is On Two Wings, by Michael Novak. In total contrast to the crude anti-Semitism of Europe (which continues to this day), the American founders were deeply influenced not just by Christianity but Judaism. For example, John Adams wrote, "I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation." Thomas Jefferson saw the United States as "God's American Israel," leading human beings out af a decadent Europe to a new way of life.

I believe America and the world are at another evolutionary crossroads, or perhaps even impasse. Yes, the modern children of Israel successfully escaped the decadent world of Europe for the new American frontier. That frontier expanded westward, until there was no frontier left, so it expanded upward into space, downward into the oceans, and "beneath" or "behind" the illusion of solid materiality, into the subatomic world. Where is the new frontier for the American children of Israel?

It is into the only truly infinite frontier -- the inward frontier explored and mapped out by the forgotten little search party with whom we parted ways three thousand years ago: the lost tribe of the Brahmanic peoples. This does not imply a blending of the two traditions, only that our exteriorized western religion must recover its own rich interior dimension, which already exists, but has rarely been emphasized in the institutional forms of Western Christendom.