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Thread: Was Pre-Enlightenment Civilization Superior to our Epoch?

  1. #11

    Re: Was Pre-Enlightenment Civilization Superior to our Epoch?

    Quote Originally Posted by Seeker View Post
    I cant say much about the yugas that have gone by , but we have recorded history for the past 2k+ years. If I go by that , we are definitely living in a better age.

    - A child born has a better chance of surviving
    - Oppression of women has greatly reduced
    - Slavery is abolished to a larger extend
    - knowledge is disseminated far more easliy

    I can go on and on...
    Notice, however, that these are all particular and external goods. One can have a hundred clean forks but only one dust-covered knife. The problem is, the knife is what's required.

    What I am after is a certain internal state I think has been lost due to the particularization and goal-directedness foisted upon us by new desires. Multimedia seems to perpetuate this sense of desire which has left us without a self.

    Furthermore, I can question all of the goods you propose:

    - A child born has a better chance of surviving

    Why is survival set at such a high value? Why is non-survival set at such variance with the human condition? Death may not be the terrible boogeyman we think it is, but a gateway to transcendence. I am not saying survival is of no importance, only that it is overrated, and leads to undue attachment to form.

    - Oppression of women has greatly reduced

    Has it? Women are certainly more equal in many respects, and protected from physical if not psychological harm, but are they really in a more benefited position now? Instead they seem to be at the mercy of a new type of oppression: their sexual objectification. I can fairly attest to this in my experience of college. Women have been cornered into an awkward position, and the panacea: radical feminism, seems to only further problems, for both sexes.

    - Slavery is abolished to a larger extent

    Absolutely. But, what do we have in its stead? Lower classes have nowhere to turn but the government. And without any lower institution to guide or accommodate them (such as slavery) they may instead wreak havoc on the rest of the populace. I'm not saying we should reinstate slavery. But slavery did serve as a sort of buffer against mass disorder.

    - Knowledge is disseminated far more easily

    And the more facts that are present the less we know. The wider the valleys, the shallower the depths. Wikipedia and high school courses may furnish us with some knowledge, but what they can't hand down is wisdom. Real knowledge and wisdom are lived out, and are rare things by nature, I'll wager. The internet is more or less a storehouse of many facts but very little justified true belief, what to say of real, authentic wisdom-traditions. So this point I set at very little, as well.
    How can I put this in a sentence? Try next time.

  2. #12
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    Re: Was Pre-Enlightenment Civilization Superior to our Epoch?

    Quote Originally Posted by Kismet View Post
    The thing is, there are far more distractions now than there were a thousand years ago, thanks to the admittance of so much new media. Before you may have been a simple illiterate peasant. But in a sense that was alright, because you knew yourself and you knew your God; you knew what was expected of you and you also knew others thought likewise: hence there was a unity of thought and feeling and duty which nowadays is all but nonexistent. Instead what you have now is a cheap humanism that means only the vaguest of things.

    Most of us look upon the past as ignorant and filled with brutality. But what I find even more brutal is the particularization going on now, the descent into self-centeredness and personally oriented pursuits which does away with any sense of honor, sacrifice, or selfless love. Relationships, for instance, are about nothing but pleasure these days and perhaps have been the entire past century. What loyalty exists, and on that foundation real love, is seen as more a myth than anything else.

    But that myth was a reality, long ago, when humans weren't distracted, but situated well within reach of the true Self.
    Respectfully, I would question the assumption that there are far fewer distractions today. Yes, we have our choice of entertainment media in our many hours of free time. But we do have those many hours available to us. In earlier times when Indians (and most other cultures) were an agrarian society, most hours of the day were spent laboring on a farm, with precious little time even to sleep. Today we have the choice to spend our free time performing bhakti to God or amusing ourselves in front of the televison, whereas in ancient times we did not have that choice. This, I think, allows people in present times to be far more spiritual than we could be in earlier days.

  3. #13

    Re: Was Pre-Enlightenment Civilization Superior to our Epoch?

    I think that we are evolving forward to a much more compassionate world very rapidly.
    There is still a lot to be done but we are getting their slowly and securely in some places and faster in others.

    I have another thought on technology too.
    It is a distraction, but not necessarily a bad one look at the intellectual discussions we are having right now, we are all learning so much. I wouldn't have them with anyone other then at the Ashram.

    We have knowledge at our fingertips, we can google anything and get the answer in seconds.

    There have been studies done that says that we are losing memory and that our brains are changing due to all this technology. But that study also said that our devices actually serves as an external memory.

    Isn't that amazing? We can access memory that others(us) have provided for us, something that we have all build together, isn't that us being connected to each other? That is us getting closer to Moksha and being ONE.

    Maya

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