Namaste’

Bp. DDL. Rochelle, OST

The idea that in earlier ages humanity had a greater spiritual faculty is based on the widely found traditional teaching that humanity has declined from an earlier golden age (or Satya Yuga) to the present iron age (or Kali Yuga). Rudolf Steiner, who has definitely influenced my understanding Christianity, similarly taught that spiritual vision was progressively lost and substantially disappeared after about the time of Moses (c. 1200 BC). This spiritual vision did persist to some degree in the mystery religions but even this was lost by late classical times.

Sri Yukteswar, who was Sri Vivekananda’s guru, wrote in the Holy Science that the capacity for spiritual vision was linked to the great year (the 26,000 year precession of the equinoxes) as well as to longer astronomical cycles. According to Sri Yukteswar, we are currently in the dawn age of the ascending Dvapara Yuga, having passed through the lowest point of the Kali Yuga, and time of greatest spiritual ignorance, at around 500 AD.

Thank you for reading and commenting. Good points about atheists, and about the super-rational intellectual nature of religion. Personally, I do like Spiral Dynamics, but now that you mention it, I am going to pay more attention to see if I detect the patronizing attitude in the Spiral Dynamics literature and in Ken Wilber’s writings on it. As I said above, I surely find it in Stuart Davis’ articles and blogs, but in the original Spiral Dynamics and Wilber, I have perhaps only seen that slightly. Wilber tends to focus on the higher levels, which as you say are vague, since those levels (what Wilber calls 2nd Tier) are raw mystical connection and difficult if not impossible to convey in writing. Wilber is one of the few (and Tolle!) who manage to describe with these pale signposts (words) the tip of the iceberg to the point of catching a glimpse… in my opinion. That’s why I found Wilber’s Theory of Everything and Tolle’s A New Earth and Power of Now to be so exhilarating.

Why do you think and what evidence do we have that the super-rational intellectual faculty was more widely present in earlier forms of religion than today? The earlier forms of humankind’s religion are not really known, altho many modern reconstructionists like to imagine what they were like, often reading into scant texts or even pre-historic relics religious practices and beliefs that probably were not there.

+Katia

Thanks for this post. I have found the spiral dynamics principle to be of doubtful value. The higher levels are extremely vague and the lower levels are defined primarily by a rather patronizing attitude to political and cultural ideas seen as less evolved.

I don’t think that committed atheists care much about the distinction between good and bad religion. For the committed atheist, all religion is irrational since they accept only an empirical standard of evidence (and God is by definition not an empirical object). On this view it is the irrationality of religion that usually leads to “bad” religion.

A superficial rationalization of religion is no remedy, of course, since this approach tends to lead quickly to practical atheism. Religion properly understood rests on a super-rational intellectual faculty, and that faculty was far more widely present in earlier forms of religion than it is today.